


get around your magnetic field

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, An Unfortunate Lack of Explicit Xenophilia, Gen, M/M, Politics, Post-Season/Series 04, Psychic Bond, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 08:15:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14712437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: In which Matt Holt puts alien technology to questionable use and Lotor takes his father's empire.





	get around your magnetic field

**Author's Note:**

> fair warning: the acxa/lotor/zethrid tag is for one explicit scene at the end of the first chapter. otherwise, the sexual relationship between lotor and his generals is not the focus of this work. let me emphasise particularly that this fic does not explore xenophilia with nearly enough of the depth or attention that its ships reasonably deserve. now you know what that tag was about!
> 
> if you see anything else in this fic for which you'd like a warning, you can let me know.
> 
> dedicated to my best girl: somehow both the eternal glorious sunfish of my heart and the monster who first pointed out that this fic is technically motorboating, "because it's matt/lotor, and you're _shipping_ them! get it?" words cannot describe how i feel about you, baby. in large part because freedom of speech doesn't protect credible physical threats.

# *

Theory: there's a trick to survival. He just needs to find it.

It's a long ride down. In the castle elevator, Matt is counting heartbeats. He holds his breath until the next floor stripes past the pane, white then gone. Ice rattles in his marrows; the platform's humming under his heels. He blinks and digits snap at the backs of his eyes: Euler's number, Feigenbaum's first constant, pi—numbers marching through his memory like soldiers, row after row.

There's a thought he isn't thinking. Its acid clots in his throat; its static shakes through his fists, bracing along the railing. Around him, the world's a stop-motion sequence: seconds broken into snapshots, sight and sounds ringing hollow. Only the numbers carry on, row unspooling into row. His grip gets steadier with every tick.

This is the first trick he learned in space: draw a line from _now_ to the deadline. Break the line into pieces: steps to climb without thinking. _Don't think_ —that's the key. Give the mind a routine that it knows like instinct. Run that routine over and over until the pattern overloads all thought. Feel and move and keep counting. Keep going, and fear will fall behind.

He needs another number.

Three hours since he'd left Pidge hunched over the biopod in the lab. Six since his last meal, green and slick, now sour on his tongue. Fourteen days since they'd started looting the Altean archives for abandoned technology—just him and Pidge, wandering the arctic rows of cryopods in the royal inventory while the castle flew on, far from the reach of Zarkon's fleets. Thirty days since the Coalition planets cobbled a hasty treaty suspending _interference with system-state sovereignty_ as an intergalactic crime, and started mass evacuations for the most vulnerable planets surrounding their last battle. Thirty-six days since Naxzela—since Captain Olia had swung their ship into orbit around the Castle of Lions and barked into the rusted intercom for harbor, dammit, _harbor_.

Thirty-seven days since they'd brought the prisoner on board.

The escalator sinks to rest in a dark hall. Its doors hiss apart to a bruised quiet: weak lights splotching across a long bridge, countless shadows gnashing along the floor. Too dark, too soon.

Matt shudders out. He walks. 

One step, two, six. Seven days since he'd drawn up all the schematics from the library databanks. In the half-light of a castle night, he'd traced a glittering, pixellated route from roof to basement. Over and over. Memory streams after memory—but there's only one pearl of a chamber left ahead. One figure sprawls in its iron seat, dreamless and still. A single locklight loops the cell's faceted pane, a ribbon the color of deep ice.

He's running out of numbers. There's an irony here, and only one.

Matt fans a hand open against metal. Shadows ripple along the hinges of his glove. The pressure registers: _access authorised_. The alarm whistles once before the lock's eye winks out. A mechanical network clanks and murmurs under the panel's pebbled steel as the prison's cryoprocedures disengage, one by one. 

Inside the cell, the prisoner opens his eyes.

"Wow." 

His echo cracks through the pale light. Matt pinches his brows together. "I know—technically you're not really in suspended animation. But it looks pretty close from out here. I guess I figured you might need more of a delay. Some adjustment time before you really woke up."

Overhead, the ship's engines grind through the stillness.

"I was gonna say _good morning_ ," Matt says. "But I get the feeling it wouldn't mean that much to you right now. Do you know how many days you've actually been in here?"

"Long enough."

There's a huskiness to the prisoner's voice, a sound that's charred but not yet ash. Light glares through the cell like winter. It carves all his strangeness into cold relief: his pearled hair and sleek, dusty skin; the sharp prickle of his ears; the white that stings along his fangs when he talks; the way his eyes track every move without faltering.

He's alien—but humanoid, tetrapod, a bipedal vertebrate with inherited pendactyly. They share a shape, a language, a grudge. They've worked towards the same cause. 

Two years ago, maybe it would have been enough.

"Well? I assume that there's some service I can offer you."

The world slams back: eyes struck to life, hard as lanterns, time pouring between them. A laugh flickers in Matt's lungs. He crushes it out. "Man. I think that might be the first time one of you's _ever_ thought that."

"Shall I repeat it for your savoring?"

It's lazy, indulgent—the tone of a man baiting a pet, or a guard reaching through a dark door. "All right," Matt says, and means _enough._ "I get that the Galra have a skewed view on how you're supposed to treat prisoners. But you should know better."

"Suppose that I don't," the prisoner says. He flicks two fingers. "Educate me."

A shiver wracks him, thunder in his shoulders before it goes seething down to a coil in his belly. _Educate me_ , like a command. The right tone can reset an entire game, sweep out all expectations between a visitor and a prisoner. Given the right prisoner, the wrong visitor.

"Actually," Matt says. "I came down to talk about you."

Five fingers flexing. Thirty-one teeth. One swallow. Two.

He isn't Voltron's head or the last heir of Altea. The gambits that he gets to play against a prisoner, in his position, are limited.

He says, "You have a problem. The princess let you on-board for two reasons. You saved a lot of people, and you promised to feed us intelligence that could break down critical imperial structures. The problem with that kind of deal's that it was never going to last. Sooner or later—the empire's going to figure out where its leak's coming from. Your information's getting stale. The patrols're already changing their schedules; the factories have all been locked with new codes. Not that we're not _grateful_ for the tip-offs. We'd never turn you back into Zarkon. But none of that means we have to keep you on the ship."

The prisoner looks at him, sharp as carving glass.

"You're running out of time," Matt says. This is the easy part: there's nothing left in him but this answer like a knife. "Right now, the—the rest of the paladins are talking about where and how they should stow you away until the war's over. That's _when_ , not if. Unless you do something first."

"And?"

His wrists jerk. Matt forces them still. "And," he echoes. "All of that seems pretty important to _me_. But maybe I'm just not Galra enough to get it."

"We are speaking of manipulation, not of Galra tactics. If you intend to persuade someone, it may serve you better to give them some idea of what you'd like their conclusions to be."

"I didn't say I wanted to—"

"Didn't you."

Their eyes clash. The prisoner unsheathes a smile.

"Or perhaps you'd prefer that I speculate on your behalf. Very well. You've gone to some length to inform me of my uselessness. But that alone wouldn't warrant a personal visit. Of course," his wrists weave apart in an easy show, "there's the angle of public favor as well. The Coalition intended to use Naxzela as the rebellion's first great uprising, an inspiration across the universe. In that, you failed. It's likely that the empire's colonies are paying the price for your failure as we speak. It can't have escaped your minds that you still have one piece left to play." 

One piece. One price. Raw silence aches in his teeth, heavy as iron. Matt chokes it down.

The prisoner goes on. "At a time when Voltron most needs a show to rally its remaining forces, it's obtained a hostage who _looks_ the part of Zarkon's heir. It's a convenience for all parties. The castle needs a way to dispose of a prisoner, and I'd be surprised if its followers aren't looking for a target on which to vent all their fears. With a well-staged public execution, you might even hold the Coalition together for a few months more."

Four sentences. Two eyes. Beat after heartbeat, jutting between his ribs. Every word bells between them, knifing with intent.

"Funny you should say that," Matt says, holding his ground. "Because as far as I can tell? A public execution mainly means we'd have to let you out of your cell. Bet it'd be way easier to break out of a few chains than an entire castle on red alert."

The prisoner stills. One beat, two and four.

"Not that you were thinking about that," Matt says, softer.

A tray gleams at the foot of the cell's shining pane. Bending, Matt drops a little capsule into its pan. The sensor seethes with light, and the tray snaps into the cell. "I don't trust you," Matt says as the prisoner stares down at this singularity. "I think I've made that pretty clear. So I'm not asking you to give me anything that I wouldn't give you. And I'm here because I'm willing to offer you the one thing no one else will."

"Such as?"

His glove unfurls: another pill sits in the hinges like a pearl.

"Leverage," Matt says.

The prisoner kneels. He rolls his own capsule between gloved fingers—pinches as if to crush out the shine. 

Matt's grip tightens—but he doesn't give himself time to doubt. There's a weight under his ribs, numberless and cold, an idea that's crystallised into a choice. At some point, thinking only hollows out space in the body for regret.

"If you know anything about the Alteans," Matt says, "then you should know they were working on a lot of biomanipulation tech right at the end. That included brain-machine interfaces. I've been running tests on the old tech for the last couple weeks. If my results are right, these—" he nods "—can link brain activity between two people. All you have to do is slide your piece into your ear. Only we can take them out safely. Until we do—if your neural signals ever stop, then so will mine."

He'd lined up a speech. How open trade and hostage recovery had once been the two prongs of Altea's diplomatic priorities. How their alchemists had turned from probing the limits of alien discoveries to governing them, weeding out that which couldn't be controlled, filing down their fangs, drying out the poison. A history sprawling with innovation and cultural manipulation, farmed into neat lines. 

But the prisoner doesn't rise.

"I wouldn't have expected any member of Voltron to be so desperate."

"Desperate."

The prisoner flicks. The pill tumbles down to his fingertips; it jolts off his curving nails and goes bouncing back again, momentum in a cage. "I do remember the conditions under which this castle granted sanctuary to my ship. A soldier's life paid for mine. With the lengths that Voltron will go to save a single fighter, I cannot help but wonder—do your friends know about the offer that you're making to me?"

 _A soldier_ , he says, like it was ever that easy: a number and nothing else. But there's an artful dip to his lashes, a hook at the corner of his mouth. It's a conspiracy of a look, studied and sly—a trap where the question isn't the point.

"Not yet," says Matt.

The prisoner rises, turning back to his bench. His shoulders hold in a blade's line. "You seem to expect so much of me."

Dust clumps in his mouth: the hazy weight of faded holograms, ink puffing from printouts that he'd read in the long, waiting nights on a faraway asteroid. "You know, they tell stories about you," Matt says. "There're records everywhere of the things you've done, from Central Command out to the borders. How you're Zarkon's son _and_ his field-commander. How you've been fighting his wars since the day you bent the knee in front of him and he gave you your first army. But the two of you haven't been on the same ship for centuries. And everyone knows that you don't rule your territories like he does."

"I don't doubt that my history's common knowledge in this castle. And yet I only seem to have persuaded one."

"Guess some of us're more _desperate_ than others."

It tolls the air, shrill as struck glass.

"Listen to me," Matt says, and makes it cold. It takes a showman to pull off passion; he'd need charisma to command. The only sound he's got on his tongue tastes like pleading. He can't afford that yet. "Just— _listen_. Naxzela might have looked like nothing to you, but it did matter. We broke through a blockade in the empire, and we kept that territory. Thousands of people across the systems are free for the first time in decades, and it's all thanks to Voltron.

But that's not enough anymore.

I've done the research. The Galra Empire's been enslaving entire galaxies for thousands of years. That's longer than some planets have had sentient colonies. Now that Zarkon knows we're a threat? An actual alliance with hundreds of identifiable planets involved? No matter how fast we move, it's not going to be fast enough. Zarkon knows exactly where to go to knock us out. The Coalition, the castle—" he steadies himself, biting back a hiss "—everyone's already talking about waiting until the next big chance. Right now, the priority's already turned into just getting people out. We're executing hundreds of evacuations across dozens of sector. No one wants to take another risk this soon."

A finger taps the bench, ticking every thought. "In another time," the prisoner says, "they'd call this treason."

"Yeah? Guess it's too bad they're not alive to say it."

The prisoner's eyes flick back, mechanical. It's a blade of a look, gutting through the armor still pinching his shoulders and knees; it measures his every shiver on its steel. Matt knows how he looks with his dark circles and restless gestures, glasses crooked where they perch on his nose. Human and hollow and shaking where he stands.

"Very well," the prisoner tells his paladin armor, his forgettable human face, his desperation. He flips the capsule and snaps it into a fist. "Let's try it your way, green paladin."

Matt's hand clenches under his sister's glove. In the silence, he pinches the pill tight, presses it into his ear, and lets it fall.

This is the second trick that the rebels taught him: weakness is a weapon too. Nothing gets an enemy to move faster than real blood.

The capsule twitches as it rolls inside.

The engines drone on. Matt breathes in and tastes nothing; he flinches and it trails down through his knuckles and little bones, nerves and tendons still in place. The prisoner doesn't look any different in the new light: eyes all bruising pressure and gold as lamp-fires; the same thin jaw tensing against an uncertain tic; hand clasping hand as his thoughts churn through a relentless current. The air's clean on his tongue, bare of scent or season, and through the mists of the barring pane, the green paladin stares on like a stranger, like a mirror—

Matt stops. 

He thinks, or means to, starts to. But the thought gets lost somewhere between his skull and the open dark. The cell is blurring into a double-vision, a gleaming that unravels into the blade of the bridge stretched behind his back. The world's sharp and smearing, a mirage pinned under a microscope's lens. His eyes jitter for focus; his wrists sway, and the same tremor pulls through the arms before him. He swallows and sees the jump of another throat between the shadows and the gleaming. His own pulse, framed in a stranger's vision.

There's a thought he isn't thinking, still—its weight rots at the backs of his teeth. But the world's opening up to a space where the trembling empties out to icy light.

"It worked," Matt hears himself say. 

His voice, hoarse and wondering. Not his.

He can't stop staring. Through the pane, an alien gaze watches him back, dark and gold in wheeling, burning reflection.

# *

"—got to be kidding me, Matt!"

Matt winces. His knuckles flare along the desk. "I mean," he tries, "the paladin suit material's pretty flexible. It pulled right back to its regular size as soon as I took it off."

"You know that's _not_ what I meant."

"Pidge," he says, but she isn't looking at him, hunched and digging her narrow fingers into the seat-cushion. "Come on—we were planning something like this anyway. Technically, I just moved up the timeline a little."

At this, Pidge bristles upright. The chair shrills in terror as she twists and smacks his hand off her territory. "Are you even listening to what you're saying, Apollo One? Half the problems in the history of science happened because people rushed. Do you actually know what you plugged in your head?"

"It's a bioengineered nootropic—"

"It's a _worm_ —a worm that the Unilu used to _drive people crazy_. We barely started the simulations for that weird hive mind mode on complex nervous systems last week! None of the records even talk about how it affects its hosts when it comes to stress or separation or long-term—"

Everything in the lab quakes with her thunder: from the crystals and wires to the hard drives standing vast as tombstones. "And I thought I was the astrobiology nerd in the family," Matt says, trying a smile. "You've been sneaking into my niche."

" _Stop_ , okay?" 

She hefts herself onto her feet, bracing herself up. Stillness bleaches out the lab's vast hollow. Only the screen's letters keep winking and whirling; only her nails shudder as they grit along the table's edge. "This isn't," Pidge says, and has to clear her throat. Her mouth's pinched down to bone and fury. "This isn't funny, Matt. You can't just turn around and laugh this off. You're walking around with untested tech in your _head_. It could kill you! At any second! And that's even before we bring _Lotor_ into it—"

 _Lotor._

A candleflame winks through the backs of his eyes, purple and white. 

Pidge's still alight and rattling at everything in reach—his boots, his chest, her workstation screen—in the kind of temper that could spit sparks across the floor. Her eyes snap behind the lenses; she's seething from hair to elbows in a storm. But his sister's always been like that: a figure who looms bigger outside of her paladin's armor. A legend in her own house before she'd ever been a hero.

Matt shifts his heels. His fingertips twitch, still ringing with the prison's chill. "Hey," he says. "Pidge." 

"Nope, _still talking_. Zarkon searched for Voltron for millennia, you know that? Lotor didn't even need _weeks_ before he cornered us. He manipulated Voltron into locating the comet for him, and he just took it away! He could be plotting something in the cells right now—"

"He's thinking about dinner."

"He—what?"

Matt rolls a shoulder. "Well, he's thinking about how Altean food goo compares to the military rations that go around the empire. I guess—Hunk left him some kind of modified goo sandwich or something? He's picking it apart and wondering if the Galra could reconstruct the goo in different textures." Light scrapes beneath his eyelids, mists pulling into metal: a castle of a machine with bladed edges, built out of something that glitters silver under the army lamps. It's a memory, but not his. "They've already got this device that they use on Galra army bases—it feels kind of like a 3-D printer. But they've never tried building one just for food before."

"Hold on," Pidge straightens. "It's that clear already? Can he hear you talking to me? About all of this?"

There's a film over his eyes: the long stretches of lab tables laid over a cell's hazy walls in stormy double-vision. "He can feel I'm there," Matt says. Nausea prickles down his throat, sour and electric. "Inside his head. I think he's trying to block me from getting to anything important. But whatever he's hiding, it's not much." His mouth quirks. "Plus—let's face it. If he could manipulate me while I'm reading his every thought? We probably lost the war a long time ago."

Pidge pinches at her brow for glasses that aren't there. She frowns, but it's a hollow look, tracking the turn of some faraway world. "You could've waited, Matt," she says. The frantic temper of her voice's drawing back, bound into some unreal quiet. "The worms weren't even due to wake up for months. Even after we pulled them out of cryostorage. We had time to figure everything out. You know that."

Skimming over the abandoned keyboard, he pecks a missing symbol into place. "Sometimes," Matt tells the keys, "you scare me a little."

"What does that mean?"

"We know that the Unilu's worm almost died out way back, when the Alteans were still around. They mapped its gene sequence way too fast, and based on the genes they activated before implantation, the Unilu breeders could trigger all kinds of behavior. They could use two worms to communicate across a planet. They could shorten the worm's lifespan and let its degeneration drive the host insane. They could broaden its receiving range, and leave the worm open to remote direction." He huffs out a laugh. "Once you take out the science-speak and boil everything down—how's that anything other than mind-control?"

"Do you honestly think I'd be experimenting with this stuff if I didn't think we could fix it too? We would've found a way to reverse it, Matt. He'd have control over his thoughts the whole time, just—"

"He just wouldn't ever think the ones we didn't want him to think," Matt says. His hands lace; he draws quick mute figure-eights over his own palm. One loop, three, five. "So when would we have given total control of his own head back to him? After the war? After he finished completely pacifying the empire? Or—"

" _Stop it._ "

The keyboard clatters. Pidge's head snaps down, glaring as her grip juts against the lining. The screen spins with nonsensical symbols; its light burns sea-blue over her skin.

"Pidge," Matt says, dry-mouthed. He has to be gentle—but _gentle_ 's a dandelion seed on his tongue, a loose word set adrift without meaning. There's never been a moment when she hadn't known him to the core. "I'm not—saying this is the solution any of us wanted. But it's the best of our options. We might only _have_ the one chance to take the empire down. We have to get this right."

They wait. Pidge drags her lip through her teeth. Her lenses flash crystalline; her shoulders quake under her big sleeves—and then she's twisting up from the desk, barreling against him with her knuckles gritting bruises into his collarbone, a wreck of knees and angles. 

She's a harder shape in his arms than she'd once been—heavier, colder, her long hair struck away to a flyaway nest. But here she is, still sparrow-boned, with the same fire and heartbeat, standing on her tiptoes to crush her mouth against his shoulder. Still his sister in spite of everything.

He bends with her, stroking the brittle tension out of her back. Her teeth scrape through his shirt in a warning bite like a cat's. "You know," Pidge mumbles, "I hate this? I mean that, seriously. I hate all these conversations about big stuff like _morals_ and _the best of our options_. That's not _us_ , Matt. When do we get to go back to—I don't know, talking about Tesla like real people?"

Matt rasps a laugh into her hair; he turns just enough to smudge a kiss against her temple. "Did you know that Tesla developed a high-frequency oscillator while he was researching effective power generation? He was dining at a club, talking to someone, and he realised that he had a machine that shook so much that it could pretty much cure constipation. Mark Twain tried it out. After ninety seconds of standing on the machine, Twain jumped right off and ran for the bathroom. Problem solved."

"Really?"

"Would I shit you right now?"

" _Matt._ "

_Are you going to run from her, too?_

His grip stiffens. Still Matt takes his time as Pidge stutters laughter into his shirt. A thumb trails down her nape, through the fine prickling of downy hair, before he lets her go. 

Cut loose, Pidge drops back, then pops onto her toes again. A hand clasps his shoulder, and she bumps her head against his with her old sparrow-quick grace. "One of us has to have a plan," she says, low. "But it doesn't need to be me."

It's a declaration like a light: the soft, constant flame that she's always held out for him.

It makes no sense, he thinks with sudden desperate venom. Matt knows his sister: Pidge-once-called-Katie, perpetual motion dressed in knobbly bird-slim bones, a defiant miracle, all fury and desperate kindness, brilliant in every way. A scientist at heart: no faith without evidence.

But faith is not a constant. It lives; it decays. Change the variables and you change the value.

He's changed. She should have too.

Slowly, Pidge sinks back. She clasps her elbow; her eyes cling to his face, soft and nakedly bright without his glasses. "Be careful when you go back down there. He's not an ally, Matt."

"I know," Matt says. A hand flexes at his side, warm with the echo of her pulse. "But he's the best of what we've got."

# *

His sister's hush trails him back to the prison.

The elevator doors slide apart. Across the bridge, in a cell still roiling with watchful light, Lotor cocks his head. His gaze holds in a dark constellation.

Steps are thudding beneath him, one after the other into a drift. He knows those stars, is the thing—must've traced their asterisms and movements on map after map. His veins throb with their rhythm, each light an old familiar thought spinning on the brink of memory. He knows—

 _No_.

He hadn't felt Lotor's thoughts when he'd pitched and stumbled and gone hurtling towards the elevator an hour ago. There's a reason for that.

His heels stammer then grind to a halt. The cell's field hums before him, unfaltering ice. "Huh," Matt says with nails stinging down his palm. "You must've really missed me." 

"You lied to her," Lotor says, and it's a deflection and an attack at once. "Are you always so transparent when you deceive someone?"

Pain's flickering through him in nerve and tendon, nail by nail. The sense of almost-remembering is fading under his counting, all of Lotor's strange, starry thoughts smudged back to distant shadows and pearled lines. Matt jerks forward, and at once the cell's a cell again: hard walls and one prisoner a pale, bowed figure on the long bench. 

It's the inverse-square law: the intensity of a force will change in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source. The closer he gets, the stronger the connection, Lotor's thoughts pounding their current through his marrows. He can survive it; all he has to do is get used to it.

Even when it comes to psychic symbiotic worms, physics is a tyrant. It's almost comforting.

"We're not being recorded," Matt says, answering the question beneath the smile. "So you might as well forget about convincing the rest of the castle about anything just because you said that out loud."

A twitch snaps through Lotor's gloves, and Matt's gaze rakes over them before a fist clenches down the claws bristling under the cloth. Fury thrashes through him, a deep black wave—but not his.

 _Fifty-two. Fifty-three_.

He steps back. The pressure eases. "You know, you could just _ask_ me for answers," Matt says. "After all, it's not like I can hide anything from you either, right? Not like this."

Silence boils in the gap between them.

But Lotor's hard grip slackens again; he tugs each glove over his blunt fingertips. "You led the green paladin to believe that you were planning to release me."

"I also told you I was going to give you leverage. Wanna tell me which time I was lying?"

"Not yet."

Matt stares. "Not," he echoes, "yet."

In the cell, Lotor's already settled back: head cocked, his jaw propped against a knuckle, cat-eyed and lounging on the bench. His hair sways over one shoulder, a sleek veil stitched with light. "I agreed to leave my protective custody on the understanding that I would be supported by a paladin of Voltron. You'll understand if I'd prefer to investigate the changes in my circumstances before I agree to them."

"You're telling me that you _want_ to stay in the cell."

Lotor's mouth cracks, carving a smile. "After all, your life is no less in my hands," he says. "Should I not guard what you've put into my care?"

The question prickles his teeth like a hook. Another trap, Matt thinks—but it doesn't matter. He swallows the metal of it, the pang; his hands flutter and spread in showy surrender. "All right," he says, and means it: with Lotor, the bait isn't the point. "Ask me anything you want."

"When you spoke to your sister," Lotor says, "you seemed to have _moral_ objections to putting a mere puppet on the throne. Yet by my understanding, you'll now have access to my thoughts and memories; you'll be able to prevent me from acting against your whims at every turn. Your life is a shackle on any action I might take." His gaze holds, glassy and unyielding, with all the softness of old ice. "How is this _bond_ anything other than a crippled version of the mind control that you refused to support?"

Images spiral through his ringing contempt, too: visions in seething, chemical pulses. A prison-guard's helmet, a metal cuff snarling with raw power, a flood of violet lights pounding down to bone. Matt shuts his eyes. It's a trick, a trap. He needs a number. He needs—

"For starters," Matt says, too loud, "if I had control? You wouldn't be using the word _cripple_ like that."

"Oh, leave the technicalities to the weak."

"What else do you think I _am_?"

In answer, Lotor looks at him—a gouging look, fit to peel skin and pulp flesh. His unruly hair, his night-hollowed eyes. Smaller than the least of the iron-boned recruits serving in Zarkon's army—and small among the rebels too. A voice which has only ever laughed and pleaded and faltered. Raw-knuckled hands which had fumbled with medicine on a prison ship, dropped their first blaster, wrestled with alien keys and lost. Ears still ringing with a prisoner's hoarse, distant gasp: _chin up, Matt. We have to make it back to Katie and Mom, remember? Now c'mere, bud, up you get. You're really shivering. Ah, hell—you're still just a kid._

Not a hero or a paladin. Not a commander. Not even a soldier.

"Regardless," Lotor says, clear through ash-fine memory. "My concerns remain. You don't believe that this process can be reversed."

His throat flutters to swallow; the taste of metal scratches across his teeth. There's a game here, Matt knows, and he's losing it—but Lotor's still watching him. "It's supposed to be possible," he says, shaping every syllable. "It's just harder. You have to disable both worms at the same time, and fast. As soon as they register any kind of damage, their trauma backlashes on the hosts. There's a reason they were outlawed in pretty much every sector where the Alteans could warn the locals. These things are right up there with tardigrades when it comes to sturdiness and lifespan. Even alchemy can't get them out unless you really know what you're doing. Whenever we decide we're ready, it's going to take the right surgeon, and cooperation from both of us."

"You're taking a remarkable risk."

"We don't have time for me to keep telling you things you already know."

"Don't we?" A restless hand sweeps down Lotor's thigh, hip to knee; Matt's jaw tics with the phantom touch, felt and not-felt, sleek as silk in winter. "You've convinced me that it's to your advantage to manipulate me. What a hard-won triumph. But let's weigh your side of the matter. You've involved yourself in a number of Voltron's projects. Without you, they would have found it far more difficult to coordinate with all the scattered units of the rebellion. They stand to lose a great deal if ever you turn against them.

But you won't. That was fundamental to your choice. You aren't a fighter by nature; you aren't in this war merely to bring peace to worlds beyond your knowledge. Everything that you have left to lose is beyond my reach. And so you think you're incorruptible."

Matt laughs, a shock of sound. "You know, I figured you'd be trying to show me you're willing to cooperate right now. Shows what I know."

"Do your allies fare so well by you? By your own admission, you went behind the paladins' backs to steal and corrupt trade secrets from a civilisation not your own. You deceived your own sister."

"Stop saying—"

"I won't deny that you told her the truth of the worm's effects, and your intentions for its use. But there was a reason you chose this tool in particular. Perhaps she even knows your reason—but does she understand it?"

"Why exactly do you _care_?"

"I prefer true loyalty," Lotor says, "but I know when to settle for someone with the proper motivation. Your sister has a gift for invention. She's only chosen to hold back because she has faith in you. Do you truly imagine that there's any price she wouldn't pay to free you, if she saw the danger?"

The quiet churns. His pulse is hammering in his wrists, his throat, the count at the back of his skull.

One beat, three, five—and he's at the edge of the cell, where the barrier cuts white across the platform. Power hisses over his skin; his lungs crackle like pumping static. "New _shackle_ ," Matt bites out through the forcefield. Light's all around him, numberless and singing; it boils in his veins, through the arch of his shoulders down to his wrung-out fists. "If I decide to let you out, and if you get your plans off the ground? You leave Pidge out of anything you do."

"But I feel as if I'm just beginning to understand you. _The brain's the most powerful processor you have,_ " Lotor quotes with a bird's fluting silvery tones and a look that's all teeth. " _And it can_ never _be hacked._ "

"Shut up."

"You're angry with me. By what right, I wonder? You've told half-truths to everyone who's turned to you since the start. You might truly believe that I have the skill to take my father's throne. But you wouldn't come to me for that alone. Even now, hope's still rooted inside of you, reeking and rotting in a place that no worm could reach. Deep down, you'd _prefer_ that the worm weaken me. That you could invade my mind, take apart the stronghold from which I've won all my victories, and drive me to my knees at last. After all—I represent the Galra Empire. It's only fair, after everything you've suffered from my kind."

Lotor rises. At the forcefield's edge, he reaches out—stops just short of brushing the point where its gauzy light writhes electric. His smile's a secret coil; his eyes gleam in starry contempt.

"The Galra have much to answer for," he says. "But do not pretend that we changed you for the worse. I know your kind. You were a creature of fear long before the empire ever took you."

Matt jerks forward. Sparks glitter off his boot as the forcefield shrills around him. His head snaps high and too late, too close, he feels it: Lotor's thoughts surging in a tide inches away, pinned back only by his will.

Lotor's smile widens. He lets it fall.

The world shatters. Lights and lines go tumbling, snapped out of shape. Memory floods him, drowning his heartbeat. He's a space echoing with an impact and a dull roar, a plea hooked and squirming between lungs and throat, and there's no room inside him to fit anything more than flash after sensory flash.

_A sword. A crest. The white weight of his hair in his fist. A science log, constellated with bony scrawls of a ghost's name. Tossing under cyanide-blue nights. Little fingers broken backwards, bruises knotting up each joint. The thousand pinpricks of a fleet, webbed over a ship's bright screen._

Forth and back, the tide beats on. He inhales new language and breathes out history. The bond has gravity and it's pulling through his skin, slamming him into the forcefield over and over. He's shivering, clinging even as the impact shocks through him, old memories spasming under his eyelids.

One name, Matt thinks, boneless and aching. _Keep counting._ If he counts, he will survive. One name, one sister, one reason that he can't let go—

_—his leg is burning._

_The floor's cold and unforgiving beneath him. He's scrabbling to sit up—he has to sit, to see, but his calf's screaming red, tendons gashed open and every nerve blaring. He can't feel his foot: its numb weight clumps under him, lurches and collapses. He twists under a monster's shadow, a black scar on the blinding arena light._ You'll die out there— _but that's something Matt whispers to himself later, alone and shuddering under the prison's rotting light. A lesson, a prayer, pieces of a secret that drop like lit coals into the dark between his ribs—_

> Survival is an exchange. Leave behind what you can't carry. The dead are too heavy to bear.
> 
> Forget the heroics. Think of a number.

  
_One breath. Another. He's coming back together. The pain's bleeding dry in beads and waves. The scene snaps out, one frame in a sequence that he's already lived. He knows this part. Day by day, the guards will drive the prison herds to the arena gates until one of them shuffles out to the blades and fangs leering in wait. The weakest get pitched to the mines. The rest will shiver in their cells until they rot._

_Twenty-three days. Five rescuers. One mantra that beats under his ribs like his own heart—_

Keep going. Keep counting. He doesn't need to be the hero. In war, in physics, positioning is everything. The right place at the right time. All he has to do stand against what's coming, and outlast it.

Matt gasps. The world comes reeling back.

The forcefield's still roiling against him, his fists and knees and desperate weight slung against a current frothing with sparks. He's pounding at the cell, livid with instinct. Through its trembling light, he sees Lotor's hand sunk inches from his inside the barrier: knuckles wrenched pale, clawing as if to tear through its veil. To reach him. His slitted pupils are jittering; the whites glow with a reflection out of focus. Caught in the throes of his own backlash.

_As soon as the worms register any kind of damage, their trauma—_

Matt goes staggering backward. The pressure drops out; the prison plunges back to silence.

Lotor's already on his knees. He shudders out, hackles and heels heaving. His hair's gone tumbling over his shoulders into snarls and frayed loops. His gloves are gashed with holes; his claws leer along the cell's bright floor.

"Thank you for that," he says, rusty and low, and lifts his head. "Matthew Holt."

 _Matthew Holt._ It sounds wrong on Lotor's tongue, static dripping onto skin. There's a reason that he's saying it like that, bait wrapping over a new hook—but Matt just laughs. "See," he says, "maybe if you'd led with that, you might have actually gotten out of there."

"I thought that the advantages would outweigh the price."

"Well, congratulations: you thought wrong."

"How much longer do you intend to allow fear to control you?"

"You just tried to attack me with tech that _I installed_. Do you seriously think _fear_ 's the reason I don't want you out here as an ally?"

Lotor draws a foot up. A bootheel digs against his thigh; his wrist hooks over the knee as his fist winds tight. He looks at once like he'd never fallen—posed with all the forged, bright balance of a blade. "I needed to provoke you," he says as Matt stares on, bruisy and tense, spine still roaring with the arena's faraway jeers. "You would never have exerted your full strength without a sense of true threat. Now you're as aware of the truth as I am: if it comes to an emergency, you can use the bond against me."

Matt turns, stalking for the bridge. Lotor's voice burns through his shadow like a searchlight.

"Your usefulness to the rebellion is already past saving. Whatever might be said about my skills or my loyalties, Voltron has need for me yet. Your death would remove two pieces that the Coalition might have leveraged against my father. A true strategist would never allow the risk. Until the bond's cut, you've ensured that from now on they'll only ever send you out with an army at your back."

Ten steps to the elevator. Five. Cold pulses in his bones and sings ice up through his veins. 

"Three hundred quintants."

The question hooks and knots in his throat. Lotor's memories have burned out, all their colors pressed flat—but his logic clings and lingers, worse than a ghost. There's nothing else he could mean; he'd only ever had one card to play.

His head bows in spite of himself. He touches the seam of the elevator doors. "You're not an army," Matt tells his reflection.

"No. But I know how to raise one."

Three hundred days to uproot an undying conqueror and shatter all those loyal to him. A scientist would demand proof: strength, a show of resources, a plan. No faith without evidence. A coward would say _do what you want—just promise you'll look out for my family_.

Matt twists back. Their gazes lash together, and slowly Lotor smiles.

"I am, of course, at your mercy."

# *

It's a peaceful jailbreak.

He comes up from the cells with a drone by his shoulder and Lotor trailing behind. As usual, Pidge's handled everything—cut the prison's alarms, assembled the paladins for the official story, sent a customised robot to monitor her brother's progress and, Matt suspects, to blow out the floor if Lotor slips his leash.

_Your sister has a gift for invention._

But it's easy to think about other things. C3P-Rover's at least the third of its line, and even better for being fresh from Pidge's tinkering. On the main floor, it goes swooping ahead without instruction, steering them out of the residential area. They follow its shadow through columns of jagged and glittering basalt, dark pillars cut from some ruined moon. Holograms surge in the alcoves as they pass, swinging capes and ears prickling sharp through their cloudy hair, brimming with color and dusty laughter.

The halls get colder. The castle's pulse slows, beating along the walls with a current weak as water; the polish and pale steel of Altean design fades into carved panels and dusky tiles sketched in gold. There's something telling about the change—some sense of ceremony that lingers in these archways and vast curving chambers, tender and gleaming as the secret hollows of a sea-shell. Altea in its day had celebrated its alchemists and diplomats—but here, always, lay its beating heart: in etchings of juniberry flowers and the stone they'd dug out from a silicon-ringed planet to build its formal halls. Its kings had cried out for peace and progress while carrying the bones of towers raised before they'd ever looked to the stars. 

They'd wanted unity, but not enough to let go of the scars and grudges of their own history. Nostalgia wrings hypocrisy out of even the cleverest mind. 

Matt flinches. His step strikes echoes from tile, leaves them ringing between pillars into thunder. His shoulders curl; he breathes in, and holds it tight. The thought tumbles off of him like ash. 

Not his thought. Not his voice.

If Lotor's looking at him, he doesn't know it. He doesn't have to know.

The drone floats into an unlit archway. It chirps twice, then hops and comes to rest by the frame. Matt touches it as he goes by: a good luck charm.

The doors burst open to a storm.

Whatever Pidge told them, it wasn't enough. Every paladin's kicked away their skeletal chairs. Shouts blast into the vaulted ceiling. Snarls and jabbing flurry all the way down the long, silver-scaled table, and the light bristles off their armor. Lance's nearly lunging over the steel to gesture at Shiro—but Pidge and Keith have already locked before his chair, united in a grim-eyed shield. Hunk's flicking to and fro, palms waving like nervous fronds. At the head of the table, Allura's gritting down her temper as Coran hisses into her ear.

Lotor cuts across the room in strides. Head after head turns as he goes sweeping by, and the shouting bleeds out with his shadow. He drops himself into the seat at Allura's right hand, and lifts his eyes to a newly-minted quiet.

"Well," he says. "Shall we start?"

Mumbling and snapping with dark looks, the paladins sink into their places. Lance thumps back in his seat, dropping his heels onto the table in lounging outrage—but knocks them off again, a quick floundering burst, as Allura glares.

By some unspoken pact, Shiro pushes himself to his feet alone. "Obviously," he says, with a faint crooked irony, "we're aware of what's happened with you and Matt. I'll get straight to the point. You can probably guess that the fallout from the Coalition's last move's still ongoing. I won't lie to you: right now, we can't afford to throw away any of our resources. Even the less reliable ones." 

The room's milky light shifts around him as he talks, haloing his armor and the broad slope of his shoulders. At the mouth of the room, Matt grits his eyes shut. For a moment, he's pinched inside a cadet's jacket all over again, standing in a dark auditorium with sand at the tip of his tongue and his father pressing his back, warm with pride. _There's our pilot. Never seen him take an assignment he couldn't fly—and you wouldn't believe the scores he worked up to land this mission. Well? What do you think?_

"We're willing to hear you out," Shiro says, and it carries across the hall. "But if you're counting on a commitment from Voltron, you're going to have to give us a lot more than a few locations and guard schedules."

Lotor looks at him, a knife gliding over a vein. His thighs cross in a whisper of cloth.

"Let's be entirely clear on our respective positions," he says. "This is hardly the first attempt at treason that Zarkon's overseen. The empire's been unstable since its formation—chaos works to the emperor's advantage. Much of the imperial economy depends on the exponential growth and demand supplied by conquest and everlasting war. The emperor has never had a plausible successor who might have held even the territory that he claims in a single year. According to our last imperial census, we've grown to encompass some few thousand planets with forms of sentient life. A little over a third of these have been restructured to maximise their productivity."

"What a truly remarkable way to describe _slavery_ ," Allura says.

"I haven't come to defend the choices of my father's tyranny," Lotor says. He's close enough to let the words sink between them, an intimacy that begs its listener to lean in. "But Voltron's recent intervention has affected systems beyond those bordering Naxzela. Entire sectors are plunging from martial law into chaos. This state of affairs can no longer stand."

Hunk's arm bolts into the air. "Wait-wait-wait—hold up, hold up. I know that diplomatic code-speak! You _want_ to free the planets that the Galra took over?"

"I have yet to lie to any of you. Nor do I intend to. But it would take more than a single command to ensure that all of the enslaved planets survive to be freed."

"Unfortunately, we asked for assurances, not excuses," Allura says. "Is this all that you can offer us?"

A shadowy hand sweeps across the table, but curls back again, just short of an offer. "All right," Lotor says, like a gambler tossing a bad stake. "Let's consider what the Coalition could do without a Galra ally. Say that Voltron murders my father. It then makes the announcement that all imperial bonds are hereby dissolved. What would come of that?"

"People could finally do _whatever they want_ ," Keith bites out—but drops back again as Shiro clasps his shoulder. 

"Yes," Lotor says. "Planets which were previously united in struggling against a mutual oppressor realise that they have nothing to fear any longer—except each other. I've already told you that the empire's kept relations between systems unstable as a matter of policy. Certain sectors are forbidden from cultivating their own crops. They pay by installments to have the supplies to survive each year shipped to them. The best supply and transport contracts are put into bidding wars. The fruits of slavery on one planet often go directly into fueling the work of its neighbors. No planet trusts its fellow prisoners; no state recognises another species' right to interfere with its sovereignty without prior agreement.

As the universe's new hero, Voltron might be allowed to intervene in these disputes. But Voltron has its limits—it cannot address every dispute in hundreds of star-systems separated by light-years. Its first and best use has always been as a symbol: it represents the will of rebellion, the last light of a peace kindled before Zarkon's empire." 

"Uh, but it's _not_ just Voltron that'd be getting involved." Hunk swings a nervy look between chairs, left and right. His brows furrow; his eyes go round. "I mean, guys? Right? The whole point of the Coalition—"

"Your Coalition consists of a few well-positioned rebels and perhaps three dozen populated planets, nearly half of which have yet to develop long-distance spaceflight." His gaze flicks from face to face with the relentless, impersonal interest of a politician. "It's designated no interplanetary trading system or mediation channels. Its only true purpose is to remove Zarkon from power. By now, the empire's bureaucracy should have sent out a formal decree denouncing the Coalition's authority as a mere ploy. Enslaved planets might accept its judgment with Voltron's support—but you'd be hard-pressed to find any others who wouldn't see it as a new form of conquest." 

"It is easy to criticise the ideas of others, " Allura says. "Do you have a proposition of your own?"

Lotor's smile flashes through the great hall's lamps. One hand turns up, cupped like an offering. "Both Voltron and the Blades of Marmora have sought the throne. But your failures come from different places: as a force beyond reckoning, you've only been able to find Emperor Zarkon on battlefields, with a fleet of ships between you and victory. The Blades of Marmora had the advantage of being able to infiltrate Central Command—but were only able to achieve lower-ranking positions. Their kind is always the first to be sent away in the times of the emperor's weakness. What you require is an ally who will not need to fight Zarkon in order to close the distance between them—who can afford to take advantage of the court rites, and hold the empire after Zarkon's fall."

A knock sings through the table, too heavy for flesh against steel. "You want to take over the empire," Shiro says, "by yourself." 

"Whatever Zarkon imagines, an unstable empire only leads to an uneasy throne. I've had centuries to learn his ways. I don't lack the resources to take his place—I only need the opportunity. One favor from Voltron, and I could win my way back into the empire to regain my father's trust."

"I hope the favor isn't transportation," Allura says, cool-eyed and dry. She's crooked a wrist beneath her chin, holding it in a slender perch. "We've had reports. Forces across the empire are still searching for you. Until Zarkon revokes his order, it doesn't seem practical to give you a ship that will only be burned when you go to beg for his forgiveness."

"I'll have no need to beg. Zarkon will meet with me, and he'll revoke the order when he does."

Lance barks out a laugh. "Yeah?" he says, too late and too loud. "How're you gonna get to _that_?"

But Lotor doesn't falter; he's looking at Allura as if to cut into memory the marks stroked above each cheekbone, the long jut of her ears, all her bright resolve held like a sword. "You've allied with the Blades of Marmora. Ask their leader about the informant's privilege." His smile skews in a lazy slope. "They should be able to provide you with a thorough explanation; they've certainly killed enough deserters before any could assert it."

"And what, the rest's just gonna be smooth sailing, All Hail The Lost Prince, happily-ever-after?" Lance brandishes a twiggy arm, swiping out his frantic outrage. "Look, I don't know how to tell you this, Pantene Pro-G, but we're going to have a hard time trusting you just because you say there's some obscure Galra thing that'll work for you. You just spent months hunting us for the empire. We put you in a _cell_. You're actually telling us that you're about to go tattle to your dad! You still have a _lot_ of reasons to stab us in the back over here!"

At once Hunk cranes over, hefting his chair across the floor in short, straining pushes. "Okay—bud?" he whispers in a drilling hiss. "That's a great point, totally valid—but maybe we shouldn't be reminding Lotor of all the reasons he should be selling us out?"

"I would hardly ask that you put your faith in me blindly," Lotor says, clipping away Lance's cue before he can take it. He turns to look across the hall. "Trust him. Isn't that the reason that I've been allowed to speak?"

It's like a match dropped into gasoline. Silence flares down the table, roiling awake.

"Matt," Allura says. She's all warmth and gleaming under the hall's gauzy lamplight: the pearled knot of her hair spun out to a dreamy glow, her pressed lips gone soft with concern as she leans forward. "Can you confirm his claims?"

"I—"

He needs a number. But his pulse is looping static. His hands knot along his thighs; his throat grinds with sand. Somehow Matt had tumbled into the lilt and rhythm of Lotor winding through Allura's sharp, sure blows, Lance's snarls, Shiro's clumsy steering—slipped and forgotten himself. If he swallows, he might turn Lotor's last question over his tongue.

Like any commander, what Allura wants is a simple answer. It beats in his temples, scrapes down to the roots of his teeth. In a way, it's just that easy: over and over, Lotor's told the truth. He hasn't lied since he'd hefted himself from his battered cruiser and onto Voltron's mercy. 

But the truth isn't the only point.

"I don't know what his chances actually are," Matt says, measuring each word. He doesn't look past her. Across the room, Lotor's attention is a heavy blade on fraying rope. "He's not lying about being willing to having a plan, or wanting to ally with Voltron. The informant's privilege—" but it spins out of his reach, mist to wisp to airless spark "—isn't about Voltron, but it _matters_ to the Galra. It should get him back in front of Zarkon."

"What else can you tell us?" A frown's rusted through Shiro's voice, darkening its bell-clear pitch. "Matt—we need you to be sure about this. It might sound like a worthwhile risk, but Allura's not wrong—he's not giving us much to go on. Especially if he's planning to head in there alone."

"But I never claimed that."

Lotor's tipped his head back, lidded eyes and a slender smile. He isn't looking at Matt. It doesn't seem to matter. "When I go," he says, then bows with his own correction: " _if_ you'll allow me to go—I'll need him by my side."

" _What?_ "

A chair goes skidding backwards—cracks the wall and goes thundering as it tumbles onto the floor. Pidge slams the table, her whole frame rigid, her grip choking white. "No! That's not an option—why would you _need him_?"

"My face and my habits are well-known to the imperial court," Lotor says. "When I regain my former rank, I'll recover all the old duties and publicity of a prince as well. Central Command is perhaps the only part of the Galra Empire that does not operate under martial law. What I need is someone who can do my work out of sight, whose reactions cannot be anticipated—"

"Because you don't have one _single person_ who'd be willing to take your orders without turning you over to Zarkon."

"What would you suppose, given the death of the last general who followed me?"

Under the still lights, Lotor rises. His fingertips trail the gloss along the table's edge, blue over bone-white. His shoulders clench, then ease; he measures out his breaths, draining each syllable into something hollow and ringing before he lets it fall.

"Stirring rebellion from inside Central Command," he says, heavy with memory, "has its risks. I won't pretend otherwise to win my freedom from you. But you must see the chance that we have—Matt has the potential to play a part that no one else could. As my servant, no one but the Emperor would be permitted to interfere with him without cause. Yet he would be able to access places that neither I nor any general could reach. His eyes would be my eyes, and any knowledge that he takes from our cooperation could be shared with the rest of the Coalition." He stops in place; his hands shape something like a plea before he drops them. "I would not ask if I knew of any easier way to take the throne."

"You want to use _my brother_ as a spy."

There's a crisp almost-buzz growing under the quiet, a sound that's not quite sound. Lotor's looking at Pidge with a narrow, studying look: measuring the paler swoops of her flyaway hair, the bare snub of her nose where Matt's thinly splotched with freckles, her flinty mouth and round cheek against Matt's leaner jaw. Every difference counted and categorised, shelved like numbers in rows. 

The tactic hadn't been meant to work more than once; but still Matt feels the click of the precaution in his skull.

"He's had some experience in the field already," Lotor says at last, as if he'd only been thinking of his answer. "I don't intend to put him into any position for which he hasn't been prepared."

"No."

Allura rises. Her chin's driven high, the blade of her jaw tense with judgment. "The risk is too great," she says in her low sweet tones. "The Coalition is at its limits. If we are to be true allies, we must have some certainty that you can succeed the throne as you claim. So far you've only shown a collection of pieces that you might play against your father. That cannot be enough."

Lotor's smile curves like steel out of a seething fire. "If Zarkon were so easily predicted, he would have been dethroned before the end of his first thousand years. The only strategy which _can_ be used against him is patience—waiting to be in the right position at the right time."

"Spoken like a Galra who has yet to learn from the loss of his last general," Allura says.

Silence floats down like ash. Matt tastes blood down to his back-teeth.

"Voltron was the first hope that these planets allowed themselves for centuries," Lotor says. His gaze is a beacon. Gone's the rest of the room, the castle, the danger of a cell still beating with frozen light from floors below. The world's crushed down to two shadows, a space where he looks at her like a conqueror measuring a rival. "And you failed them."

"With these evacuations, we rescued millions of people. But perhaps you've forgotten the value of freedom."

"Freedom. You drove millions out of their homes and left dozens of planets for the empire to drain dry. Was that your idea of rescuing them? Don't pretend," Lotor says, "that you've any understanding of what people truly value. When Voltron first faced the emperor in single-combat, your only risk was to yourselves—your team and _your_ weapon. The same cannot be said for the situation you face now. Now that Zarkon's witch has revealed Naxzela's true nature, who in your rebellion won't wonder whether something hasn't been planted among their asteroid rings and moons? You demand so much of the Coalition, yet seek to have your own fighters spared from even the slightest danger. Is that how Voltron treats its allies?"

They could keep going like this for hours, move against countermove. The weight of their argument's heavy in his skull already, slit-eyed, fangs dripping, all the words that Lotor hasn't yet said heaped in coils. It'll be a dazzling show, and a useless one. Matt doesn't know Allura the way her paladins do, but he can read a face: her charging shoulders and the gutting line of her mouth, the light in her eyes like battle-fire. There's no surrender in her.

But she's never been the one that Lotor needed to convince. 

His fists wrench back, thudding hard against the wall. Lotor hasn't looked at him, but one look wouldn't make a difference. There's an icy weight swaying between his ribs: a mind like a pendulum, chipping at time with every swing. 

Lotor's delaying. There's a reason for that.

"It's not just about giving you a ship," Matt says.

Lotor and Allura turn together, a cold syzygy of attention. "Is it not," Lotor says.

Matt rolls his shoulders, crushing the reflex to pinch his brows together. It's something that Allura couldn't have said with Pidge braced across the table, waiting to savage and salt the earth. Lotor's been kept dreaming in crystal for weeks, drawn out only when they needed his information; he could never have brought her the strategy that she's demanding. Both of them are playing a longer game.

"You know how hostages work," Matt says. "Once Voltron lets you go, we can't keep you from doing whatever you want. You may be telling the truth right now, but you've changed your mind about alliances before. Fact is, I'm the best hold our side has on you. So if you want to take me with you, you're gonna have to leave a different guarantee."

"Matt—" 

A protest's sketching itself out in Allura's teeth. Lotor overrides her.

"I'll leave you with a record."

"What?"

"Ultimately, there are only two advantages in keeping me as a prisoner physically. Unlimited access to my information, and the chance to prevent me from interfering in the war. Allow me to leave with Matt. In return, I'll make a recording which details every vulnerable point in the empire for the next sixty quintants. If I haven't brought you any success by the time my information expires, you can release the recording across the empire. Any allies that I might have would turn against me instantly."

Matt opens his mouth, then stops again just to look at Lotor: his polished jaw and the sling of his shoulders, the offer caught in his splayed hands. Every inch a man bargaining for his life—and yet.

"Wow," he says. "You came up with that _fast_."

Lotor only gazes back at him, a clean-cut light. "I know what I ask is no easy thing. Our mission is a dangerous one—but I believe its stakes will be worth the cost. Surely, as someone who's long fought for freedom, you must understand."

Easy words, but he hears the echo beneath them: _your usefulness to the rebellion is already past saving. Until the bond's cut—_

The rest sings down to his bones.

Matt wants to laugh: it shivers in his jaw and through the dryness crawling down his throat. He's been measured out and pinned down, given a script whose ink feels like something sapped out of his veins. The next line's already darkening his tongue. "Yeah," he says. Because he's supposed to, because he means it—because of a satisfaction that isn't his, beating in every vein. "Sure looks like our best option, doesn't it?"

" _Matt._ "

Their voices clash, sharp and shrill. Pidge rings in his ears like a bell, shaking, fading, crumbling into pieces. He can't look, but it flashes under his eyelids: her fierce round face drained pale, a hollow moon; her eyes burning stark and huge behind the lenses. His sister who's never faltered.

"Matt," Allura says again. Her chair grinds back; her footsteps murmur across the floor. "Are you certain?"

Matt bows his head. "You know, it's really pretty hard to say _no_ to anything when you're looking at me like that, princess." But that's the wrong tone—his fingers tic at his sides in some unraveling count. His mouth trembles as he bends it to a smile. Steady, steady. "You didn't let me drag Lotor up here just so he could tell you about some ingenious new plan he invented to bring the empire down. You wanted him to prove that he meant it—about wanting to overthrow Zarkon. About bringing peace. And he's right. If we're really going to free all the captured planets, someone has to take the throne once Zarkon falls. And if anyone stands a chance at holding onto that, it's Lotor."

"That was never our only reason for hearing him," Allura says.

"Maybe it should've been."

 _A soldier's life paid for mine,_ Lotor had said. He'd boarded them with one kind of sacrifice, borrowed another to get out of his cell. He hadn't planned the sequence, but he had seen the opportunity and seized it. They had given him that.

But the rest of the world goes out as Pidge rounds the table. In a sweep she's crushed out the distance between them. But her boot stops between his; her fists grind knots in the empty air.

They don't touch.

"Apollo One," she snaps at last, and his smile crooks. 

"That's four syllables," Matt tells her, as if they aren't numbering everything between them now: inches, days lost to space, words clinging and unsaid. Counting down together. "Way too long. If you're seriously giving me a nickname, 'Matthew' comes with a lot of built-in potential. We can do better."

"Well, _I_ didn't say you were getting a choice."

"Is this because you're still mad about 'Pidge'? I thought you liked it now."

"Yeah, after you campaigned for _four years_."

"Have to admit it's snappy, though."

Her chin juts hard; she clacks her teeth at him in the way she'd loved to do at five years old, a tiny beast in a gaudy green onesie. "I'll show you snappy."

"Sounds like a plan," Matt says. His eyes sting like sand; his glassy voice's scraping raw. But he's smiling, still smiling. He can't stop. "You can show me when I get back here." 

Her hand clasps his nape; she bumps their heads together. "Do you have to go?"

Matt closes his eyes. Even in the dark he can reframe the space between them—the way her lashes have crushed against her cheek and the sway of her breaths like a chain waiting for a knife. This, as with everything, he will remember. "Yeah," he says. "I think I really do."

# *

In the morning, Pidge flies them out to the planet Vjeagrauc to buy their ship.

They go by Lotor's coordinates, guided by Lotor's hand on the navigation screen—but in the cockpit there's only two: hunched in their seats, body echoing body, hands rattling arrays across their green-stitched keyboards, voices winging through the hush. Everything else is barely a shadow on the brink of vision—soundless, colorless, lifeless. This flight's just theirs: an arrow through a universe frenzied with stars. Nothing matters but the code. 

Landing's almost a surprise. A speck in the windshields blooms into a world, continents stirring across green seas. Without a hitch, they shift protocols. Together they tumble through the roar of the stratosphere, clouds wisping and ribboning around them, as light bursts into an emerald-lit sky. 

The Green Lion strikes earth without sound. 

Across the windshield, every holo-screen snaps out. Daylight pours through the lion's cloaking as if through water. Rock shivers under its paws, bare patches that glisten like crude oil. The world out to the horizon burns like something seen through a green flame: just rustling gold and silicon gleaming, with grasses scraped yellow by summer, a stretch of dazzling black flatlands broken only by iron posts and a sun cresting overhead. 

A new day. A new world.

He means to talk. To say anything. Words cluster under his ribs and knit through his lungs. But the beat of the flight's faded with the lion's engine. The world is still, and there are three waiting in the silence.

Matt leans forward from his seat just as Pidge twists back. They go tumbling together, clumsy as drunks. Her crown crushes into his nose; his lips prickle with her hair as her knuckles snag his jaw, his collarbone, his ribs. Her fingertips claw into his cloak; her arm bands over his back. She's too thin. He should have said that before. There's a host of things he could still be saying, each spinning vast as an empire between them—a thousand or more, in the kind of count that could take days.

But he lets go.

They'll have time. It's an old thought, and a new one. He has to believe it.

They take the foot-bridge out. The Green Lion shimmers as it bends to Lotor's steps, then his own; its long throat glitters with silhouettes, white jaw and dark paneling blurring beneath the weight of the cloaking field. All of it's gone as soon as they hit the ground. In their shadows, there's only empty land and a horizon scrawled with smoke.

"Well," Matt says, when his voice has cleared. "Where to now?"

"We're taking the long way to our destination. There's going to be a security checkpoint ahead. Stay with me."

They walk, following a footpath that's more seam than trail. There's no dust, only wiry grasses gouging up through scratched volcanic stone, pebbles winking like the pinpricks aross a motherboard. The gravity's heavier here than it had been in the castle or the programmed weights on his asteroid station. One by one, his steps fall like stones. 

Matt keeps count.

The land rises into a little hill, all stripped rock with a steel tunnel hollowed through the stones. A tree sways by its mouth, branches gnarled in a tangle of long violet petals. Five figures have sprawled under the shadow: clanking horns and armor, cigarettes and iron rings jutting from their knuckles, lazy with laughter under a hologram reel of diamond-backed cards. One's prying a ring off her finger as Matt comes up the slope. She slings it across the circle. The reel blurs into pixels. A hologram-card vanishes from her hand, and slides into place before her opponent. 

The guard climbs to her feet, grim-jawed and cursing. With one eye still pinned to her space poker game, she beckons Matt and Lotor forward. A dim wand sweeps from their heads to heels; she waves them through without another look.

Sound guides them down. The tunnel sings with the deep note of an engine newly-oiled, broken only by echoes from somewhere past the winding corners and the hard, burning crystals. Somewhere, a crowd's bawling orders, thumping at counters and hollowed tables, grinding cutters into metal.

Dark earth bursts open again, and the market's air tumbles around them, copper and frying oil flickers under every breeze. Down the steps, there's a valley curled around a labyrinth. The long slopes are studded with mazy rows of shops: stalls striped like silvery shells, boutiques teetering on polished wooden wheels, tents wreathed in carnival lights flashing gold and violet. Everything's a path or an attraction. Stairs pound up through the thick shelves of rock, glossy and foot-worn, wandering to nowhere. Signs teem across the rows, flyers pinned up next to jittery holograms, arrows scrawled with alien lettering all over the flyaway footpaths. Glass trams leap from cable to cable overhead, driving sparks out of wire, wild birdcages swinging as they run. 

"Let's try this way," Lotor says, and Matt follows.

They pass tables caped in black velvet, silvery displays of sleeve valves and idle-jets laid out like ornaments. Sellers brim from stalls and doors as they go by. Dialects boil in the air, fluted and growled through the fat green lockets sparking around their necks. By the tents, hagglers hop in bargaining dances under a golden morning. 

But there are gaps even in the market's bristling life. There's a niche under a white staircase like an empty harbor. There are patches along the slope where the glassy black rock riots with carvings, all claws and seething waves and scratchings of code, pale mosaics that snake and writhe, shaping monsters at war. There's a pattern through the older signs, a rhythm between its sculpted lines and arabesques. Something bigger had lived here before the market had carved its den into the earth. Whispers of it still cling to the corners of each light and conversation, a question begging for a listener. Just one afternoon might be enough to trace it back. A few hours, and he could unearth some of the history beneath the stalls, smooth along the alcoves to trace the alien letters winding through each frame—

"Matt."

The world bleaches out.

He breathes and it stutters through him: a static shock, a double-beat. His grip flexes over a shoulder as it stops, as it tightens and shivers, canvas and bare skin, shadow over shadow, his-hand-not-his—

" _Don't._ "

Matt wrenches away, a quick lash, jarring wrist and elbow into a stranger. The impact blares. Something flurries out of him—an apology, maybe. The stranger clacks its beak in outrage before it plunges back into the flowing crowd. 

Lotor hasn't moved. Daylight sifts dusty gold through his hair—it thins his armor into faded shadows. His stillness burns through the path like a star.

"When I asked you to come with me," he says, "I'd counted on your ability to adapt." His distant gaze doesn't falter, each pupil a knife-slit. "You hate me. You have reason enough to hold onto that. But our expedition won't go much farther than this if you cannot learn to trust me in some small part as well."

Five steps. He could shut his eyes and see the world still: the jeweled shops laid in aisles brittle as frozen ink, the air woven with cables and lights, the fading space that holds them apart. This close, Lotor's sight is his; every word sinks between them like a whisper pressed into skin. It hadn't been this strong in the castle hall, or through the quiet ride in the Green Lion—but maybe the fluctuation makes sense. The bond's new. They're adjusting.

Everything gets easier with time. He just has to live out the countdown.

Restlessness rolls his shoulder back, and he holds the pose just to feel it. "I don't hate you," Matt says. The ache's already emptying out; and with it the sense of his own fingertips catching along the bone, the echo of Lotor's will steering his muscle and nerve. "Not really. I guess it's just—taking longer than I expected to get used to this."

The crowd washes around them, murmuring and meaningless. 

One, two, three—Lotor cuts towards him in hard strides. Matt turns as he brushes past, and their steps fall together like rain. "There's something that I'd like to look at," Lotor says, "over here."

He doesn't need proximity to read the way the command's been framed.

Together they press up a splintering in the path to a stall netted in silver. Silver drapes over every display: cloudy porcelain lamps chained to the stall's vast mesh by loops slim as spider-thread; valves and chimes winking under a row of tiny spotlights; an intricacy of lockets and plugs drooping in loose tassels across the netting. It has the intricacy of a show and the logic of a theft alarm: pull any one thing loose and the whole stall would ring with outrage, silver singing into a storm.

"The sellers are from Rufal. I recognise the style."

Matt skirts the corner of another table before he goes winding back. There's no keeper in the stall, but a camera glowers from the roof's lip, beady-eyed on every flash and turn. "That's great," he says. "But speaking as your soon-to-be passenger, I think you're gonna need a couple other things before you start checking out spark plugs."

"Your advice is invaluable. And I do appreciate the trust it must have taken you to offer it." But the words come with a glint from the corner of Lotor's mouth. He touches a silver dome scrawled with carvings, pale hand-worked lace frothing over needling bars in an alien pattern. Shadows flurry through its polish as if through water. "Have you ever met a Rufalian engineer?"

"I didn't get to travel all that much," Matt says with care. It's true by comparison. "And none of the engineers I worked with really talked about that stuff when we were in the field."

"Then none of them came from Rufal. They still have a deep pride in their home-world—my father has yet to subject the Rufalians to the same treatment that he's pressed onto other conquests. I believe they sent a preemptive surrender to the flagship of the initial fleet before it touched their soil."

"And Zarkon just—let them?"

"The emperor pursues his war above all else. He always has. Rufal is required to send tithes and to submit to the standard imperial inspections on schedule, but there are worse fates." 

Lotor's still talking, but his words are only sound and stirring air. The bond's gone dim and colorless in his skull—all that comes through's the numb certainty that he's not alone. But even without its fog, it'd be impossible not to feel Lotor in his space—the way he moves, sure as swordsteel; the polish along his voice and artful gestures; the hair that sways against his nape with a light no alien star could tarnish.

Blindly Matt reaches out. A cold pearl curves from the mesh and into his palm. Cloth comes spilling by the fistful, into crumpled white folds that might be skirts or armor. The metal thread's been worked fine as salt; it shivers as he tugs it open, reflecting back shimmers and silhouettes behind him. 

"Not that this isn't pretty interesting," Matt says, watching the same shadows flurrying through the cloth. "But I think we're picking up a tail."

Lotor bows over another piece, thumb tilting up a jewel-stitched bell for study. "Another remarkable piece of trivia," he says. "As of an hour ago, we stand on imperial soil. Vjeagrauc sits just within the empire's borders. Did you think that this market existed in defiance of imperial law?"

It isn't bait. Conversation's a game that Lotor can play with anyone who talks back, and every piece of information is a pawn. He's being told a story.

In the space of an hour, Lotor had convinced the princess to alienate one of her paladins in favor of giving him a better chance. It shouldn't have been impossible to coax a ship out of her along with a hostage. Instead they'd borrowed the only lion capable of cloaking, tearing across galaxies to drop into a market crowded with imperial eyes. There'd been a reason for that.

But there's a reason that Lotor's playing this match with him, too, here and now.

"So," Matt says, with one heel scraping earth. "What exactly's at this market that's keeping Zarkon's people looking the other way?"

It's the wrong tone and exactly the wrong question: the only way to talk back to a politician who thinks in scripts. But Lotor only tilts his head with a silk-crease smile. "Are you concerned for your well-being? Take comfort—we won't find trouble here."

"Guess I kind of have to believe you, don't I? Just do one thing for me first." Matt smiles. "Tell me you actually know what we're looking for in here."

He steps back, leaving the cloth to swing on its hook.

"I know what Galra Standard looks like," Matt tells the gleaming mesh. "None of the market signs have been using anything close. The sellers aren't speaking any of the common dialects either. I'm pretty sure one straight answer won't kill you, so try it out. What is this place?"

Lotor looks at him, then turns, beckoning him down the white steps. Together they weave through an aisle lined with long-snouted statues. The reek of oil thins into incense-smoke, a charred sweet drift under the grassy sky.

"One of the costs of allowing rebellion to flourish under the emperor's nose is that it must be allowed the appearance of true defiance. In reality, I doubt you'd find any seller here who couldn't speak the common language of the empire, under the right pressure. But Vjeagrauc is listed on the imperial registers as a niche market. It's intended to supply nothing beyond its five-planet system. The market's dialect is part of its registration: in theory, it ensures that Vjeagrauc can only serve a limited customerbase."

"So all the stallkeepers around here wear those lockets to make sure that they can talk to anyone who's allowed to come to these markets." Along the booths, alien figures are crouching, arguing, standing to reshuffle their wares to catch the light. There's blue skin and shadows wrapped in gauze, rivers of hair and horns looped in wire—but silver winks from the hollow of every throat. "And the translators' limits also keep 'em from being able to talk to too many people they shouldn't. But that doesn't explain everything," he says, thoughtful in his step. "Why don't any of them have the setting for Galra Standard?"

"Why does any shopkeeper treat their business the way they do? There's a limited number of contractors willing to make and ship translation devices out to markets located light-years away from imperial strongholds. Some features cost more than others. Contractors tend to find that they can charge a higher price to install Galra Standard, particularly with outpost markets. And as you can see," Lotor remarks, at his most bland, "their tradition keeps the markets well under control."

Matt jerks. A hard breath scrapes out of him—laughter, gone and tumbled away before he can swallow the sound. 

Lotor slants him a glance, glimmering sidelong like a shared joke. "It's not as inconvenient as it may seem. The market's licensed to provide a limited number of guides to visiting patrons. The guides aren't bound by mechanical translators; they can use their own knowledge to direct and translate any transactions between the market and a customer."

"Right. And how much's it _usually_ take to get a local translator to work for a Galra base commander?"

"That, I'm afraid, is beyond my experience," says the emperor's once-heir. "But if I had to guess, I might put it at somewhere less than a year's salary, and more than enough to keep the less-ambitious commanders from embezzling imperial funds themselves. There's only so much that the imperial accountants will overlook."

"Seems like a pretty big loophole to miss back at Central Command."

"Currency has never been of great concern for Emperor Zarkon. And, of course, there's the military interest."

"You mean the part where they're basically getting orders from the imperial accountants to stand still and get ripped off, _or else_?"

"There is that," Lotor says, every beat held steady. "But command of an outpost is rarely offered as a permanent station. It's standard practice to promote soldiers into the rank until they earn greater responsibilities—either by defending their territory or by stripping out rebel forces. And, of course, in order for a rebellion to be gloriously uprooted, its traitors must first be well-funded." 

The smile twists in his teeth, light on a crumbling candlewick. It goes out.

Piece after piece clicks into place; the story reframes itself. The empire's never been about running anything efficiently. It's a war economy: it feeds on conquest and resistance, a wildfire with infinity to burn. The army bleeds money with every battle, then rakes in newly-broken planets to stuff the imperial treasury until it chokes. But there are limited victories to claim for soldiers kept light-years behind an emperor starved for war. A good battle record would be even harder to come by for fighters stranded at the edge of civilisation, forced to defend a system just stripped of its will to rebel.

There are easier ways to dig up a few victories. Nothing that lives ever stays satisfied. Let a subjugated market start setting its own prices, and eventually it's going to demand real freedom.

It works out. Vjeagrauc's outpost would get nothing out of crushing its only supplier while Central Command's still willing to pay the bills. But, given time to test the limits of Galra patience, the market might start buying into its own folklore. That they're the first to exploit a long-set slip in the mindless Galra bureaucracy. That Central Command would let its soldiers to starve before they'd shell out the extra funds to transport food from outside the star-system. That a ragtag band of misfits could take on an empire with nothing but desperation and their own wits, and survive to glory.

"You have a knack for alien cultures, don't you?" Lotor's still looking at him as if through a magnifying lens. "I wouldn't have expected such an interest from you."

A laugh breaks in his lungs. His cheeks ache with it, an ugly leaden weight that should peel off in flakes. "You know," Matt says, "that doesn't work."

"What doesn't?"

"If you want me to trust you, it's not going to get you anywhere if you keep pretending not to know stuff you've already figured out."

He turns away. Lotor's shadow flickers along his heels, keeping three long strides between them. "I wasn't intending to use it against you."

"Yeah? Well, you have to admit—it'd be kind of hard to tell the difference if you did."

The path clears; the breathless, incensed crush of the booths falls away. They've come to a tunnel, its dark, gaping mouth framed in polished stone, church-white carvings against the valley's fire-torn black.

"Then let me offer you a little peace of mind," Lotor says.

He goes on, waiting for Lotor's cue to turn or stop. But silence clings to their shadows all through the tunnel: past the carved pillar at each corner and up the slope with lamps no bigger than pearls strung along the walls. They come out at the top of a lake-basin—long run dry, its dust pounded down with cobblestones, and crowned in pale signal-spires. Vast solar panes line the curving battlements; their undersides gleam with star-maps. Lights go shivering from green to violet across the quadrants as they trail by, promising answers beyond his skill to translate.

"Look higher," Lotor says. He's already heading for the stairs. "There should be a path for maintenance and groundkeepers to reach the spires. From there, we'll have a view of the entire market."

"Are we looking for something specific?"

"It's generally wise to have a sense of the land before you look for a target in it. This market may be barely larger than a village, but it's still possible to be lost in its streets. Knowing the layout may keep you from the inconvenience of a great deal of wandering."

"If I didn't know any better, I'd say that sounded like experience talking."

"You're fishing for information."

There's a skew to Lotor's voice, the kind of angle that might be a smile. "I know a lot of stories about you," Matt tells his back, the long shadow ribboning down the steps. "But I don't know any of the ones _you'd_ tell. I'm pretty sure there's a difference." 

"In this case, I'm afraid there's little to confess. I've served in several similar quadrants. You tend to learn their ways."

"Sure, maybe. But I'm gonna go ahead and bet that most high-ranking Galra don't pay enough attention to remember what people from Rufal talk about, or the maintenance paths at the markets."

Lotor stops. The path's wound to a faded black gate, stout and rust-bitten. Its points grind up and down like spears in mechanical patterns, gnashing at the sky; but there's no light in its lock, no hologram or software stirring as he feels along the metal. "As I told you, the removal to an outpost can be undone as soon as the officer distinguishes himself. With every promotion comes a greater likelihood that they'll be sent farther from Central Command—to planets which have yet to surrender or be properly mined for their resources. Invading commanders rarely have the time to explore on their own." 

His fingers hook between the gates; his knuckles grind white. The points shudder, old iron flaking and grunting, bars bowing like wires, before the lock-plate wrenches off the bars. 

The gate tilts open, deadbolt lolling from a crumpled frame. No alarm sounds out. Only Lotor's hands flex, measuring the ache, before they drop. 

"Don't misunderstand my choice," he says. "Perhaps I differed in my method and my intentions. But I once brought territory into the Galra Empire as well as any of Zarkon's most trusted generals. I did so willingly, for a chance to explore worlds I might otherwise never have seen—to learn their natural laws and witness their miracles. And I regret the consequences that I caused, but never my decision."

The echo rings in his ears. 

"So you wanted to explore and learn about the universe," Matt says. "And it didn't matter if the worlds you explored actually survived when you were done with them."

"Vicious," Lotor says, but not without irony. "I take it you're feeling better."

They wend through the gates, one after the other. A heavy-set bridge, stone caged in steel, slings green light back into the ripening day. Across its shining long stretch, a white spire guts the sky.

Their footsteps scratch through the panels. The crowd's burbling is floating away into the stony hush. From their new height, the market's a crow's-nest, a buzzing seam in the earth stitched by wire and bright ribbons. Tents poke up through striping loops of flags; roofs cram and coil into a jagged puzzle of gold and green. Everywhere he looks, there's a strangeness. A ring of fish-headed sellers is spinning through the market lanes, singing nonsense and jangling their bell-strung baskets. In a narrow booth at the outskirts, the keeper's crushed out every inch of space with flowers. Blossoms bow out of a glittering riot of vases and glass vials. Their petals ripple like lips under the battered roof, murmuring their lush, strange secrets into every breeze.

There's a laugh caught in his throat, a hard pearl that won't be swallowed or broken into sound. Afternoon's flooded the market with light—but all he can see's an inky photograph on a white wall, a desk-lamp shining in a still pool on plaster. _Look at this, Matt—can you believe the ice caps on this thing? One more year, and we'll be standing right there. You and me, touching down on a whole new milestone for humanity._

"What is it?" Lotor says.

An alien market. A bare green sky. A bewildering spiral of strange galaxies shivering over their heads. 

His fists clank along the railing. Matt looks away. "My dad really would've loved this," he says.

Now that he's started, he has to keep talking, to explain—he can't just leave the words to sway like hooks behind him. But the image's flickering to life, still-frame to film reel. He remembers. He can't stop. Samuel Holt, rumpled in his commander's jacket and a jaw prickling grey from three days of chasing lab results. Sam, reeking of chemicals and desert dust, one arm hooked around two squirming brats under a star-flecked night as he bawled his way through the names of constellations on a rooftop. Dad clawing his way back through the dark, the mineworker's collar biting at his skin, sparks wracking the shadows, shouting: _Listen to me, Matt! Stay right where you are. Don't worry, don't try to come after me. Just keep your head down and wait—you know the code. I'll come back for you, kid, so stay in line and—_

Salt scrapes down his throat.

A hand settles beside his. Lotor's mind gleams through him—the backs of his teeth, the dark under his eyelids, thoughts faint as stars in a space that isn't quite space. But there's no pressure, no demand behind their constellations. Just a strange sense: light without gravity.

"There's still some time," Lotor says, quiet and careful. "We might yet find something else worth seeing."

Matt lifts his head.

 _Tell me you actually know what we're looking for in here_ , he'd said—smiling, tricky, thinking he'd found an angle to play. He'd followed Lotor across an alien market, listening to story after story, talking about _space exploration_ like a soldier and a student could ever mean the same kind, and step by step, the fear had thawed from his bones.

They must've wandered for hours. Dusk's bruising the sky in splotches and dark strokes. Across the market, the stallkeepers are hooking lanterns along their roofs, striking up lights like little hearthfires. The Galra must have taken Vjeagrauc years ago—but there's no sign of the conquest between the stalls headed by strange faces, the neon signs and the swinging, glinting lockets. This marketplace that they'd built over the half-buried skeleton of a lost city, speaking in tongues that could choke an empire to swallow.

_Our expedition won't go much farther than this if you cannot learn to trust me in some small part._

Here, the war isn't over—only taken a mask and lain down in wait. For the right price, a rebellion can always survive.

Matt breathes out.

"I'm ready," he tells the wind, the rising stars. "Let's get out of here."

# *

Together they make their way out to the end of the valley.

Outside the market's scurrying, electric heart, everything seems to unravel. Time's beaten the light out of the shop-signs, and their bulbs gutter in firefly beats as they pass. Old booths squat along the soil, grumbling in metallic grey mutters, with price tags dangling along their countertops. Lanes spool out to dead ends, where there's only scattered stones and scraps of paper flyers. The crossroads have been heaped with junk: cracked screens, broken laser comms worn into bruisy off-colors, loose wires blackened under the fur of gathering mold. Wreckage and trash pile into towers as they go along, jagged and reeking, cheap metal bones jutting out from time's ragged skin. 

The stink of something like metal and mint plunges to the pit of his belly. Ethanol, Matt thinks—neat ethanol or something close, the kind of fuel they'd used to burn in Garrison engines.

Different planets, different fuels—but junkyards are the same across the universe.

The junkyard dealer's shop is barely more than a lean-to beneath a heap of trashed plane-wings, stabbed together in a makeshift shelter. She stays slouched against the dented frame as they pick their way through pyramids of gleaming flyers and cargo-runners—staring with goat-yellow eyes, her six arms braided over her chest.

It takes the better part of an hour to find their way to the right machine. 

In the end, Lotor decides on a racer with two clunky external tanks, gaudy violet stripes, and a hood stamped with a symbol that Matt's never seen before. It must mean something to the dealer, who hauls her dark squint from Lotor's hooded, imperial eyes down to the metal, and back again.

The bargaining goes quick after that—just halting numbers and meaningful silences, an exchange easy as falling.

Lotor strikes the deal but Matt pays the price. It's a tale old as the market: the dealer's locket once had access to a language outside the Vjeagrauc standard package. Her access expired; her interest didn't. 

It takes some fiddling to unlock the dialect again, then to run through the standard diagnostic checks: listening to the coarse hitch behind her consonants and the way the translator's bland static wraps over her voice. But it's enough—they get the lock-codes, the physical keys, and a keyless remote to boot. 

The gangplank snaps out in a coughing flurry of dirt and rust. Matt strides up first.

One look's enough to tell him the story: the shipbuilders had understood what they were making. Even decades after its retirement, it's a sleek, curving space, compact and red enough to mask any rust. There's an emergency tank, an alcove's worth of cargohold, five control panels crushed around two seats in the cockpit. 

Matt palms over the navigational panel and watches its panels shiver into dim, living light. He works through the system customisation by reflex more than real thought—checking the language functions, counting off the standard pre-flight checks. This part doesn't take thinking. Old lessons thrum in his veins—desert light, a timer glaring red on the dashboard, an instructor bawling in his ear. He'd buried this rhythm but never lost it.

A hand drops past his, tapping three keys. The target altitude opens on the screen.

His eyes flash up. Lotor's gaze burns pale as lamp-light, as lakewater in summer or a long-dreamt ghost. He swallows, tastes copper in every tooth. The effect isn't, for once, something Lotor means. The bond shivers between them like a sieve straining to hold water; its tension sings in every fiber. But through the silver force pulsing under his eyelids, there's a sense of someone else wringing at the webbing—a faraway force, hauling back the wave.

He's not the only one who's holding back.

"Start here," Lotor says, rattling through a quick scale. Buttons flares green across the panel one after the other. "If this has any resemblance to the imperial racers, we should be able to redirect certain take-off fuel procedures. I'd also like to eliminate as many of the speed protection protocols as possible. The goal is to customise every advantage towards maneuverability before we re-enter orbit in thirty vargas."

"Thirty vargas," Matt echoes, and opens the travel projections, tracing their arc through the screen's grid. "That's—barely enough time to get us out of the system."

Lotor strokes across the liquid screen, sifting through flecked asteroids and straying moons to stop on a beating point. "If memory serves, we can safely disembark at the final planet of the system. Vjeagrauc completed arrangements for its colonisation before its people were discovered by the empire. We'll be able to trust the atmosphere."

"Huh." Matt shifts on his heels. His eyes lid; he lets the breath tick in his throat: a warning beat. "Didn't you say that you'd never worked in this sector before?"

"Before my father reclaimed the throne, I was due to inspect selected quadrants and to renew their vows of loyalty. Vjeagrauc's base fell in one such quadrant. All of its collected data was in my possession at the time that he ordered my execution."

"And now that data's with the empire."

He'd thought of it in the market, but Lotor had steered him out of it, distracted him with one of the thousand little contradictions that tangled the Galra bureaucracy and led him away. Whatever'd been trailing them had vanished before they'd hit the spire.

"You're counting on us getting followed," Matt says as Lotor bows over the console, spinning through a wheel of silvery statistics. "You figured that this is one of the places they'd watch for you to show up. You made sure we stayed in the market for just long enough so that someone could get a report out to the Galra."

"So you can see," Lotor says, "the need for maneuverability. The ship does not need to last beyond our rescue. We might as well wring true use out of it."

"Who's going to come and rescue _you_?"

His echo shivers in the air. 

Lotor's hands flex over the console, nails carving shadows through the backlight. "Someone who understands that they'll gain more by pitting me against the empire than they ever could by bringing my head back to Zarkon. Don't tell me," he says, dry as static, "that you've lost faith in the idea so soon."

One beat, two. Three buttons ticking their measured green warnings in spirals across the screen. He keeps coming up with numbers and losing every one. He doesn't know anymore if he's counting up or down. 

He's afraid—but that's the easy part. It's harder to give himself a good reason that he hadn't already known.

"Just so you know," Matt finds himself saying, "I wasn't trained as a pilot."

Lotor only looks at him, candle-eyed in the ghostly leer of the console. "Are you familiar with the Sennen?"

The non-sequitur has its effect. At once Matt's winding back through hours of glossy stalls, the market bawling, the junkyard's billowing dust. But he shakes his head. "Not unless it's been pronounced really differently around me."

"It was their mark that you saw on the hull. It's the only formal signature for their work. The Sennen make a living by circumventing Galra military restrictions on the manufacture and sale of machines capable of space-flight. They take ordinary shuttles and strip them down precisely to the point where they no longer qualify as flyers. They sell the spare parts to mechanics, and sell the stripped-down frames to—"

"Anyone who wants to travel between systems but doesn't want to register their machines." Another snapshot memory: the dealer's hard-eyed suspicion, her six elbows jutting like thorns. She'd had another good reason to be quick about the deal, then; there was only one way that she could've picked up so many flyers in saleable condition. Matt says, "Are you sure we're even going to be able to get this off the ground?"

"You kept her busy for some time," Lotor says, which answers a question that Matt had known better than to raise. "Fortunately, the Sennen appreciate the value of sentient life. Every flyer they've ever touched is equipped with a failsafe: should the navigation locks onto a route for self-destruction, the craft will reroute to land on the single largest planet without requiring anything from the pilot. It won't last for more than one flight, but one is all that we'll need."

Matt breathes out. His fists sway at his sides, then drop open. "Okay. That's good."

"Have you never served as primary pilot on any ship?"

He reddens, feeling the burn as if under some blast of desert sun. "Most of my training was to get me ready as a communications officer and a lab aide. I can do the basics and the emergency procedures—but if you want me to do what comes naturally, you're gonna have to pass me a glass slide set and a pipette. I wasn't," Matt says, hearing his own spaced-out echo, "really pilot material."

The quiet lingers, steady under the ship's mazy lights. Only his throat's run dry. He'd flown for his first three years at the Garrison. He'd proposed a change to the projected conditions of the flight simulator, and argued his hypotheses on the density of Kerberos' surface material. In the winter of a strange new moon— _new_ in every sense but the simple one—he'd taken panoramic and closeup photos of the view. He'd been the one to deploy the retroreflectors and passive seismic experiment packages for future generations, chipping away at the mystery of Pluto's water volcanoes. 

He had always done everything he'd ever been asked to do. It was only a coincidence that none of it could have made him what he needed to be.

"You'll have to learn," Lotor says. The dream breaks—gone's the desert and the powdery ice sifting through his astronaut's gloves. There's only a voice at his side, ruthless and simple, and a mission ahead. "This panel controls throttle mode when we are in flight. Remember these symbols." 

Matt remembers.

# *

The racer's old but it starts. The engines sing a song of combustion; the boosters quake and surge. Dust plumes through the rusted junkyard rows, and the world blares white—force, clouds, and a planet's halo dazzling through every screen as they go spiraling up and out, an arrow into the dark.

There's no reason to talk, so they don't. Silence arches over the cockpit, a cold lens that magnifies every move beneath it. Lotor's skimming files across the console—stray transmissions from passing satellites; the maps folding into their data-banks at every milestone; scattered logs left in the corners of the system's last overwrite. Something in him might be resting, but it isn't his body: he breathes with the even tick of a pilot counting down his oxygen reserves, and his back juts sharp from the seat. 

Matt looks up. Stars are filtering through the grimy hood, pinprick lights weaving through half-familiar constellations and drifting out of sight. Leo, Pyxis, Vela a clumsy block standing on its head—but that's dreaming. There are no stars here that he could know.

He shifts in the seat, knocking his knees together. His fingers twitch through the old counting tic. One breath after another. Sixty-five hours of oxygen left to burn. Six new flight protocols learned. Five hours since he'd left his sister on the stripped black plain of an alien world.

His skull's crowded with numbers. It isn't enough.

"Let me know when you want me to take over," he says.

"There should be a function for alarms on your panel," Lotor says. His mouth stirs strange shadows through the console lights; his eyes settle like pearls under their glow. "Set it for six vargas. We should use the opportunity to rest while we have it."

With numb, mechanical hands, Matt pages through three branching menus before he finds the right window. The alarm sets; its digits spin into a countdown, and he thuds back into his seat. No numbers, no conversation. Nothing left but space.

Shift winds into shift. Hour by hour, the maps grid new territory on every screen, stars filtering between the lines. He flies, then rests; he sleeps, and then he doesn't. His body remembers how it goes. Even after the castle, it's easy to fall into the limits of six-hour cycle—to sleep without dreaming and wake to an alarm chiming at his side.

But he comes awake again long before his third shift. The cockpit's still quiet: the same haze, the droning pulse of radar, the blip and ionised hiss of Lotor's fingers smoothing each keystroke. But Matt's pushing forward even as he knuckles the grit from his eyes, swiping through each dim red screen. His shoulders have gritted tight, adrenaline's prickling his veins—and he knows, then, where it's coming from.

"Something's wrong," Matt says. 

"We've been found." Three clips of ice as Lotor turns away. It'd be easier to admire the precision and cold practicality without Lotor's fury locking his spine. "We'll have to skip a few steps. Disable the orbital assist protocols. We descend immediately."

Muscle memory drags him up to load variables into screen after screen. A blue-washed planet's blooming beneath them, marbled with clouds and lacy island chains. "It's going to take a couple minutes to boot up landing mode. How much time do we have?"

Light bursts behind them: soundless but simmering, rows stinging white as teeth. Searchlights.

"I hope that answers your question," Lotor says.

They work through the descent together. The sequence falls into place—a pattern drawn through his veins and tendons, knowledge rooted in the core of him. _I've served in several similar quadrants,_ Lotor had said, and here's his consequence and reward: decades of drilling procedures into memory, sharpened down to the kind of instinct that could possess a new body like a ghost.

He knows what to do.

The racer drops.

Outside the air's screaming, oxygen and hydrogen sparking with thunder and gaslight flares. It hammers through them, ailerons to rudders shaking with the impact. The cockpit quakes, alarms shrilling _red-red-red_ down the row. Matt slams both hands down, bracing himself through the shock as each holo-screen snaps dark and the thermosphere blazes around them. Through the shadowy film lashed across the windshield, he can see the land rushing up: a jagged continent blown into wide plains, grasses stirring like snow under the fuming black fangs of a mountain range.

"Pull up _now_ ," he bites out, and holds on as Lotor hauls at the controls. The chamber tumbles around them, dizzy and rattling, every lever shaking in its slot and the winds clawing fury down the ship's shell, as the racer strains to break its spiral. Inch by inch, the ship's nose tugs up, and they go scudding across the earth, flurrying long grasses behind them.

"Any ideas on when your rescue's showing up?"

"As it happens," Lotor grates, "they're somewhat early."

The rearview screen flashes an alert: past the static and tumbling weeds, a dark crescent of a scout-ship's surging through the clouds, lasers crackling between its prongs. A swipe yanks open the communication panel, and Matt flurries down slot after slot of programmed transmission channels. "They're not on any of the regular frequencies! How're we gonna get a message to 'em that you're here?"

"They've been awaiting this opportunity for some time. I doubt that we'll find them interested in talking quite yet."

Light cuts a new edge into Lotor's profile, stinging lips and eyes hard as knives through the console's haze. There's something worse in his voice—a deep, nameless undertow that might wrench his feet out beneath him if he wades too far into its shadows. Matt clenches his jaw. "You're," he says, "angry."

The wave washes out. "Not in any sense that should matter," Lotor says as the scout's shadow drapes black across their tail. "Don't look away from your screen. This will not be easy."

The racer swoops for the mountains. A grey slope slams up before them and they drag every lever, raking across the panel just in time to send the ship skimming up its unflinching rise. The trees shriek; pebbles flurry off the hull. Together they batter between two gnashing spires and drop for the closest ravine with the Galra scout pressing close behind. Frost races behind them in firework bursts—the scout's black wings are battering along the jaws of the gorge, showering down little icicles.

They keep going, jerking up from saplings and stone outcrops, steering through the ravine's narrow walls with exhaust whipping ribbons behind them. The scout's getting closer. Matt's grip locks against the seat; alone, he steers past a new turn as Lotor sets his own commands to run: opening the gas valves on a disengaged booster, unbolting each lock that keeps it fastened to the ship.

The crags part, surrendering to a field. The racer arcs up with the scout's snout prickling through its tail of smoke. Closer, closer—

Just in time for one rocket-booster to go tumbling off the racer, spraying fuel. 

Through the rush and rumbling, Matt hears the clang of metal on windshield. Fire roars into the sky behind them.

"I thought you said these guys were here to rescue you!"

The racer swivels and plummets, and the scout-ship comes snarling after them, still wreathed in flames and coiling smoke.

"They are," Lotor says, seething loud as any engine. "They're here to bring us where we need to go next, and to leave us alive at the destination!"

"That's a really long way to tell someone you don't know what the word _rescue_ means!"

He jolts forward as light flares through the transom pane. The cruiser twists under new thunder, and a new alert blares onto the screen: _damage registered to rear spar of right wing, ribs 3, 5, 6—_

"They're _firing_ on us." Another volley rings out above them. The racer bucks and dips with a new wind, and Matt grips the swinging seatbelt tight. "How much longer do you think we can hold on?"

"This should be more than enough. Are you ready?"

Through the lurch and reeling of each new blow, the firestorm roiling around them, Matt swings back to stare. In his seat, Lotor lifts his chin; his fingers bite along the steel arms, bone and claws, and his long hair tumbles like daylight. Holding steady. 

"Ready whenever you are," Matt says, and Lotor nods.

The ship falls.

Whatever emergency protocols the Sennen had left for them, none of them make up for a torn wing. The racer drops into its landing too quick and too hard. Beneath them, the wheels groan and buckle and _snap_ out. Matt knuckles over the seat-buckle, the control panel—grinds his teeth as the racer goes skidding across the field in a scorch-wide sweep.

Getting out's a blur. The hull shudders, and stops. One by one they untangle themselves from their seats. A fist bashes the lock sequence into the keypad and together they stumble out into the icy grasses. Smoke's clotted the air. Matt doubles over, coughing as he wheels and gropes for somewhere to hide. The scout's still droning somewhere overhead, its engines loud enough to shut out anything but choking. "What—"

"Wait." Lotor pushes him beneath a wing, twisting to shield him. "They intend to land."

Above their heads, the high-beam lights snap on, row after row as the exhaust writhes and withers around them—glaring until there's only Lotor left, wind-torn and defiant before his wrecked ship. Together they wait while the scout-ship eases into its own landing.

A soldier's first to step onto the little gangplank: blade-slim and unmasked, wearing the jutting armor and stripes of a Galra general. Her narrow gaze sweeps the broken racer, the field crackling with soot and ice, and stops. "Lotor," she says.

"Acxa. A fine way to greet your commander on his return."

Her shoulders lock; her heels grind apart as a hand jumps to the sword at her hip. Only her hollow, starry eyes don't flinch. "Nothing you say can help an enemy of the state," the soldier says. "We have orders to eliminate you on sight."

Lotor laughs with sting-bright scorn. "My father gave his decree thinking that I'd betrayed him. Our circumstances have changed. I suspect you'll find that he'd prefer to see me before anyone's careless enough to have me executed."

"The emperor knew enough. New information would be needed before he'd consider a new judgment."

"Information." Lotor spreads his hands. Ash flakes out of his hair, spinning into motes. "I'm prepared to yield everything that I've learned to the emperor. The current location of the Sincline ship. The method with which I identified and traced the trans-reality comet. Surely those are worth more than my death."

"Surely," the soldier says, unmoving.

"Let's leave it to my father to decide. Shall we? After all, there's one opportunity that I doubt he'd appreciate your turning aside."

His arm sweeps back in a beckoning. Slowly Matt stiffens against the wreck.

"By the dignity granted to every true Galra citizen, past and present, I invoke the informant's privilege," Lotor says as silhouettes crowd into the entrance. "We surrender ourselves to your mercy. I ask only that you send a transmission to his Imperial Majesty, Emperor Zarkon. Tell him that I've brought him the key to the Black Lion."

# *

From the inside, the scout's barely a ship at all. No cargo was ever carried in this hold—a space sliced into metallic alcoves, violet and leering, each hollow studded with a hard gem of a lamp. Through the sliding doors, there's a flash of a squat hall flanked by two doors—hardly room to rest the bones of a skeleton crew. The single pipe that cranes out of the wall has been bent into a ring, clasping the chain of Lotor's handcuffs above his head.

They've cuffed Matt too, but left his feet free. It's an easier position to keep than Lotor's, if not much more comfortable. He swallows, and feels it bump every bone and ridge on the way down. The space between his ribs has knotted up with nausea and smoke; the exhaust of the crash smears over his eyes with every blink. If he falls, he won't get up again until they land.

Ten steps to cross the cargo-hold from wall to wall. Fifteen from exit to folded ramp. Fourteen from ramp to exit. Twelve.

"Rest, Matt."

His chin jerks before he snaps back away. But one glimpse was enough—Lotor's gaze shivers through his veins like static. "I'm getting to it," Matt says, pushing steadiness into every word. "Just answer one question for me."

"Really. Only one?"

The inflection has an edge and a swordspoint. Matt's eyes twitch to the door. "For a guy who doesn't trust anyone, you sure expect a lot from me." But he crosses to the opposite wall, sinking against the alcove. "Are all your allies gonna be like that? Or is it because they're generals and they've got more to lose?"

The ring clanks; the floor rasps as Lotor shifts his legs, resettling his weight. Under the engine's muted droning, an echo comes thrumming back.

_Given the death of the last general who followed me?_

The last to choose his side, he'd said. But not the only one.

Matt laughs, and the sound sways like a bell in winter. "You're kidding me. You _killed_ one of them, and now you want the rest to come back and work for you." 

"It isn't a matter of wanting."

"How sure're you about that? Because from where I'm standing, not everyone cares that much about logical incentives and doing the right thing."

"I have no need to speculate about _everyone_. They were my generals. There is one thing that they will always want, unfailingly, more than any favor from the emperor."

It takes a really skewed slant of mind to reframe getting chained to a wall as a _good_ thing. His teeth are digging in; salt and metal glitter on the tip of his tongue. "One of these days," Matt says with the settling cruelty of an oracle, "you're going to get the wrong read on someone. And whatever else happens, I'm pretty sure you won't survive it."

Lotor only looks back at him, eyes lidded and his shoulders loose as exhaust, slouching with all the slackness of something spoiled past recovery. Only his smile holds its line: a coldly mathematical curve.

The hall door hisses. Light breaks across the floor.

They stride into the hold in soldiers' steps: wrists tucked close, angled to capture separate fields, every inch a conquest. The bigger one sweeps a glare from wall to wall before knocking it down to the prisoner. Her broad jaw works; her knuckles creak as they clench. "Lotor."

"Acxa." Lotor considers one, then the other. "Zethrid. I take it that you've left Ezor to pilot. You did well to recover me. The emperor will be pleased."

"The informant's privilege doesn't grant you the right to speak freely to your keepers," Acxa says, but her fine brows pinch. She's clasped the hilt at her waist again. "We aren't here to be your audience."

"The rights of a prisoner are as his captor dictates. But perhaps you're right. An exile would have no interest in what I could offer." A laugh brims on his lips, gleaming through the dark. "And yet—what would an imperial soldier say?"

" _Enough._ " 

Thunder pounds the hold. Zethrid's lunging—but thuds to a halt again, fangs swaying and seething with fangs, as she remembers herself. "It doesn't matter, since we're _not_ imperial anymore. You made sure of that!"

"As I recall," Lotor says, "there are exiles and then there are traitors. Only one of those can never truly return to the fold."

Whatever the words might have meant to Zethrid once, the moment's burned out. She stares at him as if to a signal-fire, her black pupils sprawling like inkblots, blind to anything but some faraway burn. "With everything they've found out after you got kicked out," she growls, "you'll be lucky if Zarkon even looks at you. No matter what you have to tell him."

" _Emperor_ Zarkon. You'll need his title if you're to serve in his empire again."

"Stand down, Zethrid." Acxa clasps her arm as Zethrid grits in place, slender claws banding against the ropy swell of her muscles. "His life belongs to Emperor Zarkon until His Majesty says otherwise."

"I had hoped," Lotor says, quieter, "that you might be the first to find me."

He's settled back. Shadows fume around him, a dark halo around his thin wrists, the sharp mouth above his knife-line jaw. Every scratch gleaming in his black armor, every tell-tale tic framed as if for display. The tension that's carved his spine. The flex of his pulse as he swallows. The twitch of his wrists in their cuffs, clinking and ringing as the engines beat on beneath the floor. 

It isn't, Matt thinks, that they can't answer him. But every conversation with Lotor's a siege. The best weapon against it's to starve him out.

"You," Lotor says, like he'd never intended them to answer. "Both of you know how long I relied on your faith in me. The Galra Empire has never looked kindly on its half-bloods. But you were the first to serve me without faltering. I raised you up to be my generals and you served me better than any true-born Galra. Acxa—" His gaze flickers over the stern set of her lips. "I trusted you with secrets and missions that no soldier should have been asked to undertake for her lord. Zethrid: time and again, you stood with me to take mortal blows that might have meant my death. Together, the five of us were a force stronger, quicker, and _greater_ than even Emperor Zarkon deserved."

"I have not forgotten her," he says, and it's rough and too quick—voice torn raw by the shrapnel of a name still too sharp to speak out loud. "If my death could have restored her, do you imagine that I would not have run myself through before we ever left the bay?"

Like every killing blow, the blood's seen before it's felt.

Zethrid jerks like a campfire guttering; her armor rattles on her shoulders. Acxa pulls back as if to slide herself behind a trigger, scorn cracking her gemstone eyes. "Restore her," she says, a low polished echo, just as Zethrid burns through the words to their heart, and flares up: "You think the witch got to her?" 

"Would I have wasted her life on a _thought_?" 

It costs him something to ask. His boot plants against the tilting floor, tapping unsteady; his wrists strain and twist under steel as he pushes himself to stand. The alcove swallows the cuffs and the skewed cross of his arms behind him—leaves him unguarded where he stands, eyes hollow and shoulders heavy as sunken wings. 

They'd followed him once—chosen him, trusted his commands, known his mind to its root. But that's only a story now.

"It was only by chance that I detected her corruption before she touched the rest of you. But I took no evidence with me, and I do not ask now that you trust in me now without thinking of your own positions. My only request is this," he says, and it rings in the voice of a sword drawn above a crowd. "If you are willing to listen, then hear this. Should I be accepted back into the empire, I intend to find evidence of the conspiracy which led to Narti's death. And I will shatter every evil creature who thought that they could use her and survive."

"Assuming that Zarkon lets you live," Acxa says.

She means it to sting, but a brittle blade never holds the edge that its bearer needs. The judgment winks beneath Matt's ribs, a firefly-whisper, and then Lotor's smiling again, bland as he is artful. His eyes are bright with contradiction—gutting starlight, a syringe-point galaxy, constellations that teem and teeth and never falter from their orbit. "There are a few steps before we reach Zarkon," he says. "You yourself told me clearly enough—you are an imperial soldier no longer. All of you belong only to yourselves."

Silence carves a bare new space between them.

But a laugh boils through Zethrid's fangs. "So you keep telling us," she says, and moves.

Matt gets the flash, livid as fever— _pain_ , crushed into veins and tendons and little bones, bruises mapping their parabola along the arc of his neck. His pulse beats thin and frantic; her caging fingers tighten.

Black sputters through his eyelids: _danger, danger_. But not his.

" _Zethrid._ "

A thick, jutting hand whips back, barring Acxa from the scene. "I'm not buying it," Zethrid says. She's jeering like a balefire, all starved white grinning as Lotor twists and gouges at thin air. Behind him, the pipe's shrilling in clear scraping notes as his chain drags against it. "If you had something that could get Zarkon to take you back, you'd have coughed it up _months_ ago. Don't you ever learn? The emperor's been around for ten thousand years! You won't fool him. And you definitely won't fool _me_ again."

She reaches past him. The wall groans, hoarse and deep; the pipe snaps like bone. His wrists drop against his back, twisting with the arch stringing up his spine, arms spasming in clenching shocks and fingers knotting up white, white, white as she hefts him higher just to see him squirm.

It hurts. It lasts.

Matt feels the thud more than he understands it. A body falls— _bruises snaking from rib to knee, a new throb chained under his jaw_ —and light comes tiding back.

"Give us a reason to take you back to Central Command," Zethrid says, dark-eyed and gnashing as Lotor heaves for breath. The pipe bristles between her knuckles, a loose branch begging for a noose. "A real reason. Or we'll watch you break apart, bleeding and choking and shriveling right outside this ship's window."

Time crawls. His hair's a veil; there's a trembling in his throat too brittle to swallow. Every shudder rolls through his shoulders and heels, all his long limbs twitching on the same merciless string. "At a time when my own father would have scorned to hear me," Lotor says. "You chose my cause, and you drew my banner to rise above every other general in his army."

"Come on, Lotor, come _on_." She crouches. Her sharp teeth split the seam of her laughter. "History? _Words_? You can do better than that!"

Lotor lifts his head. "Yes," he says, as if from far away. "I suppose I owe you that much."

The air cracks. Not steel, not his—but still Matt feels it. The thrum of joints and tendons, uvula and scalpula and clavicle wrenching in their sockets, bone under muscle churning awake to a cascading change. The visceral alchemy of body into weapon.

From outside, the move's simpler: a wet, sharp split, lamps dazzling in a short rattle, and the chain of Lotor's handcuffs loops over Zethrid's bull-wide neck. 

She's got him in the same heartbeat that he crosses his wrists and pulls—a fist locks around his arm as the other hauls at the chain. Cheap metal shrieks; links spring apart and the chain falls, a noose swaying at loose ends. At once Lotor's winding his fingers through the line, spinning the chain through a tight, fast circle to slash its broken metal across her face.

Stumbling back she goes, cursing and blood-blinded. Lotor barrels after her. A twist dips him out from the dim swipe of Zethrid's lumbering arms. His shadow cuts through Acxa's just as her hand drops to her hip.

Steel tears out from its sheath, singing.

Zethrid lurches to a stop. Blood's beaded and streaked from brow to temple. Her broad shoulders shudder just once before she tips her head to the blade seething silver along her collarbone. Only her lips keep moving—pursing, curving, working from sneer to snarl before she stretches them wide. 

"Now that's more _like_ it."

"Zethrid," Acxa says, harsh and too late. Her boot scratches through a step, and stops.

The gap could tell him something if only he knew how to look at it.

An animal in nerve and appetite, Zethrid only rears back an inch. Her sleek ears barely ruffle. "Right, yeah. Of course _killing_ 's still off-limits." But her eyes drop, and Acxa's gone. The universe's burned down to two stars: his steel and her smile, spiraling into a single savaging light. "But that doesn't mean our little prince shouldn't be earning his oxygen for the ride back."

She lunges.

They fight like monsters grown for a battlefield—their guts to map its boundaries, their blood to water its darkest roots. She crushes out every space that he opens up, gouging and stamping, wheeling behind him to smash her elbow into his spine. He parries and sidesteps each blow as it comes, and his sword snarls to match her fury, plunging for her eyes, her throat, the softer stretch along her ribs where armor gives way to suit. 

Strike after strike. The hold flinches with their thunder. The reek of the fight wraps the room: sweat, copper, meat. No angle's out of bounds, no strength held back, all their graces and strategy crushed into this haphazard execution, a whirlwind war where there's only two soldiers to lose.

Matt sees the pattern a second after it comes together. Lunge after turn's driven them in circles, one coiling into the next. Step by step, Lotor's sinking back from the open floor, leaving Zethrid to pitch after him headlong. Her fist's cocked tight, knuckles bristling with black thorns—

But he dives, slipping under the heft of her elbow as she wrenches to follow him. Her boot-heel catches the pillar's edge, and Zethrid batters into the wall. Her heavy head comes up just as his sword carves up through the lamp-light.

Zethrid grins, a white wild slash. She flings herself forward.

Light lashes out. Impact drives her shoulder into the wall. Steel thuds and shrieks as she drops to a knee, panting. Her shoulder twists under the pinning blade. Meat splits. The hilt clanks against her armor, a damp and empty chime. But Zethrid's gaze swings from the grip locked over the hilt to Lotor's face inches away. Caught up too late in his own consequence. 

She belts him across the face.

"Got better while you were in exile," she calls as he goes tumbling. A thumb swipes blood off her lashes. The wall's cracked in her shadow; the hilt bows with her shrug.

Lotor wrenches himself up. There's blood, too, striped across his mouth; he licks it off, lips and teeth alike, with a thoughtful swallow. "I merely remembered my roots," he says. " _Victory or death._ "

It shakes in him, every word.

Whatever dam had closed off Lotor's side of the bond—inexperience or adrenaline or sheer grim will—it's gone. Matt breathes and it hurts, splinters crackling between his ribs. The lights keep withering at the corners of his eyes, color into ash. One by one, the hours are pouring in, each carrying its own wounds. The prison's ice still stiff in his marrows. The suspended tension of a thirty-hour flight broken only by dreams snatched in the arms of a battered pilot's chair. The ache prising through every muscle, raw from his shoulders through his swaying arms. Every fingerprint she'd printed across his skin before she let him fall.

Lotor's tired: veins brimming with exhaust, shadows gouged under his eyes. But he looks up without a flinch as Zethrid crosses the floor.

A dark hand bands over Matt's arm. "Stay back," Acxa says, as Matt startles back. "This isn't your fight."

Instinct: he'd felt the distance and moved to seal it like a lodestone under a magnet. He counts three steps back more. "You need him alive," he tells her back, because Lotor had. "You know that—you _have_ to know."

She flicks him a glance, disinterest ground to a scalpel's edge. "If you don't understand," Acxa says, "then don't interfere."

"Understand _what_?"

"The challenge," Acxa says.

On the open floor, they're circling again, step after step in armor dark as bruising. The chain's whipping from Lotor's fingers; Zethrid's shoulders sway hard as she clutches the sword. The blade twitches between them, a needle threading lamp-light.

"You'll bleed out if you don't tend to yourself," Lotor says, and she bares her teeth. "Will you yield?" 

"Just when I'm starting to see the real show? You must be joking!"

She lunges, rattling steel and bone. Blood spatters tile in a new chain. Its reek blooms in the air, rich as ink. There's more, Matt knows—feels their pattern through the floor, guttering through the walls like flames striking into light. But he isn't looking.

Lotor had said: _there is one thing that they will always want, unfailingly, more than any favor from the emperor._

He'd been sure, and he'd been right. Just the fight with Zethrid proves everything they need to know, matted and bleeding and still fuming with a joy that could cleave bone. No one wants Lotor dead. The match they're carving into each other, claws and grief and gutting blows—it's just a game. In every way that matters, Lotor has his generals' answer.

_I regret the consequences that I caused, but never my decision._

A sour tide rises in his throat; blood foams on his tongue. Unseen, the walls are wheeling around him. The air's too close. If he breathes, he might taste the static of arena lights or laserfire. His wrists jerk; the chain rolls and drags along his spine. Matt turns away. "Do I have to stay in here?"

Behind him, Acxa's still watching with a mirror-eyed indifference that gouges splinters through his spine. There's no reason for it. One look and she must've known him: quick of tongue and nothing else, with bones too soft to be a soldier's. A hostage-in-waiting. No threat to anyone.

"The cockpit will stay locked against you," she says. "And our firearms are keyed to Galra bio-signatures. There's nothing for you outside." 

"I kind of figured," Matt says as a cry shocks through his shadow—terror or delight, a wind from some distant battlefield. He heads for the door. "But right now—I think I'll take nothing over this."

# *

Later he won't remember where the dream starts.

Acxa had been only half-right. The doors to the cockpit and the scout's cramped private quarters stay locked against him, and the keycode panels have been set too high to try any of the standard hacks. But there's another door tucked away in the corner when he looks, small and battered grey, without any panel to fence out intruders: a flat card of a door inked in shadows. Its knob gives way as he twists back against it. Inside, light cracks across rows of wired shelves lined with trays, overflowing with the hoarded junk of a scout-ship. 

It takes him about thirty minutes to work himself loose—squirming to the right angle in his cuffs, straining at the pinhole lock with a wire peeled out from one of the endless cable coils. It takes another ten to remember what to do with his hands.

Matt buries the cuffs at the bottom of the first bin he finds. With new, sharper recklessness, he goes plunging through the rest. Conquest leaves its loose ends everywhere. The trays brim with half-familiar shapes: blades broken from hilts or helicopter rotators, engine tanks and silvery satellite antennae, wires swaying in a tangle like a quarrel between spiders.

Silence hums in his bones, the backbeat to a distant chorus of engines and circulated air. Nothing else stirs. Whatever the fight's changed, it hasn't turned the ship around.

But he isn't thinking about Lotor.

He goes on, digging through the bins, setting aside the cold scrolls of old science logs and batteries whose terminals and casing haven't rusted. Oil smears under his nails in slick black curves. Silicon grime dusts up the arch of his wrists. Still Matt goes on: counting calculators, crusted glittering dishes, and handheld scanners, working until color sifts from the corners of his eyes and the walls scrub out into grey sketched lines. Only three hours since he'd slept, but the exhaust rides in his marrows, all his minutes and miles boiled down to lead. 

The lights sway overhead, pearls caught on long-stemmed pendulums. The walls loom through a veil of violet light. He's cold and then he isn't. Blood brims at the backs of his teeth. There's a throb gritting his veins and bones together, pain beating in wingstrokes. If he looks, sidelong and quick, he might see the hard dark slopes of armor hanging from his shoulders. Lightweight metal, bright stripes.

He's dreaming by now. He knows. He is. He has to be.

But knowing doesn't make a difference. Sensation keeps winding through him in lacings and stripes, heat and hunger, heartbeat churning with the engine's faraway tide. His knees dig against steel. The drowsy shadows are teeming, mountains in motion, tensing and curving, settling around him in dark thighs stretched open. His hand's chained her wrist; his little breath snags her fingertips, and he's kissing one black talon after another, lips parting as her fingers thrust onto his tongue, licking along each stroking fingerpad, fine green veins and broad knuckles, savoring the way she tenses under the clinging scent of salt and leather. 

Matt dreams and dreams: lamplight on cargo steel. Blood. A sword dropped inches from his heels. A soldier's lush and knifing smile as he kneels to press her thighs apart.

She's stripped out of her armor, shin-pieces and breastplate and hard-spined gauntlets scattered to either side. Fur prickles in the hollow between her collarbones and rides richly over her shoulders, all roses and dusk-burned greens, the thin pelt of an animal whose genes have forgotten winter. She's glossed with sweat from jaw to arms; her bare thighs flash under the folds of a long tunic. The softer spacesuit's sprawled under her, rumpling and stretching as she settles back on the crate, a beast lounging on a throne, all watchful animal appetite.

"Shall we?"

A voice like coalsmoke. His, not his, glinting in his teeth.

Zethrid chuckles; he feels the low purr of it down to bone. They've patched the bleeding, bound her shoulder, leaving her languid but not sulking. Her eyes are lidded; her claw taps his lip, and she digs down: pressing, stinging, grinding as if to hook through flesh—but she pulls back. "Sure's been a while since you lost that bad."

"I was once told that arrogance begs for future misfortune. Strange—I recall the superstition, but not the soldier who feared it."

She cocks a wrist, sleek fur and hard bone ridges, before clasping his nape. "Highness," as her thumb rubs down the cloudy, scarless stretch, "if you want my right hand, you can take it right now."

"A generous offer," Lotor says, steady through the blood still crackling on his tongue. "But I think I'd rather take all of you at once."

"Then move already. What're you waiting for?"

There's a reason, an answer—there's always an answer. But she's hauling him closer, fingers wringing knots into his hair, tugging until his mouth parts against her skin. The rest of the world winks out. On a slow, bright sigh, he trails the lash of a scar up her thigh: tongue flicking and tasting the silvery hollow of it, scraping teeth over the rough little crags at its edges.

" _Mm._ "

Shock. She's wrenched his head back. Her dark eyes hang on his lips, the way his lashes stutter but don't sink. "Gonna take a lot more than that if you want to leave your mark on me," Zethrid says. " _Highness_."

Pain glitters through the backs of his eyes in spangles and sparks. He breathes out, ragged, and feels the hitch rattle in her lungs. "Did you think," Lotor says, "that I'd forget what you liked?"

"Nice words, coming from a traitor."

"You have my life in your hands," Lotor says, husky with precision. His palm's sliding up, fingertips tracing veins and tendons—mapping her skin like it's a privilege, a grace, an act of service under her burning smile. This, after all, is her favourite part. "I'm at your mercy."

"He is at Emperor _Zarkon's_ mercy. We're only transporting him to his fate."

Acxa, of course.

She juts from the pillar opposite, the statue of some far-eyed judgment: arms folded, elbows locked and armor bright, with a stare as blind as rust. Zethrid looks at her, then cocks a grin. "Think I'm gonna break him in half, Acxa? Or," she says, "maybe you're worried that I won't take care of him as well as _you_ could."

"The emperor hasn't withdrawn his decree. You're propositioning a traitor."

"Oh come on. You saw him. He lost the match to me. That makes him _my_ traitor. All the privilege says's that he has to be able to talk to the emperor. Nothing in the law says I can't do what I want to him while I've got him."

Possession strikes Zethrid like a matchstick off a new scar. Her grip's straining at the roots of his hair. Lotor shudders on his knees. One palm clasps her thigh, steadying; but his head tips back with a thin jerk, and his fist knocks and grits against the floor, exhausted in surrender.

The silence shifts.

"No," Acxa says, clear and low. "Nothing in imperial law."

"Acxa."

It isn't an order, but it cuts through her like one all the same. Everything about her drops out of motion: her wing-slim shadow and her swaying hair cut to a still-frame. Silence works through her teeth, rooting in her jaw. But her head turns. She looks at him. 

"Well?" Lotor says, with Zethrid's claws prickling his skin.

There's a blurry sense of a different argument sparking and flaring under the words, history brimming just out of focus. It doesn't matter. He's called to her, and she moves after him.

Acxa's at his side as Lotor turns his head, sinking to a knee; her fingers sift through the bright tumbling of his hair, quick and faultless, to work open the fine-boned stays of his collar. Piece by piece, his armor comes apart. He lets her draw his breastplate out of the way—rolls his shoulders to slide the heavy sleeves of his outer layering into her waiting hands. Zethrid's wound a better grip into his hair, all pressure and talons; her heels settle on the ground—wringing harder as he trails up her thigh, pushing up the hem of her tunic to mouth over the downy skin and the slicked, darker folds of her.

He's gasping— _he_ is: not the mouth smeared with alien warmth, but his own. Matthew Holt, _Matt_ , thirty-two teeth and wrists ringed with bruises, crackling with human adrenaline and dreaming awake, curled up in a little closet tucked away from the sights and sounds of the fight, but not from feeling its aftermath. 

Sensation—not his, _not_ his—hits like new memory as they rearrange themselves: Acxa peeling apart the clinging black of Lotor's spacesuit, tracing down his pale, bared spine, briskly spreading his knees for her own convenience. Tension jumping through Zethrid's knuckles as his tongue flicks and traces over her, teasing a fold between lips and teeth until she yanks at him, cursing. The shiver that quakes through her, heels to thighs, as he lets his laugh burn out against her skin, every vibration caught and turned into a different kind of feeling. 

It's Lotor who's there, caught between them. Lotor, thumb rubbing over the crease along Zethrid's hipbone, bracing himself in place as Acxa rocks against him, slow but firm, her fingers banding over each hip, bodies picking up an abandoned rhythm—

But Matt's the one who shakes with them.

Phantom pains, fever dreams, sensation coming in wave by wave. The details keep slipping out of his head, leaving only desperate ghosts: the dim pulse under his teeth, unlabial, as he mouths and tastes each fold; the exact, alien shape of Acxa's body grinding into his; slickness and musk shifting under his tongue and fingertips into sensations that he almost knows.

They aren't human. But he isn't there—he's only remembering. Muscle memory doesn't know any better. 

His mouth's dry, teeth all bare bone caging a tongue of dust, but Matt could choke on the feel of her: her taste, her every seething breath, the jump of her thigh as Lotor's tongue works and rolls against her. Matt's panting in spite of himself, in slow and ragged pulls. The closet walls are quaking at the edges of sight, hard steel unraveling into mist. Through the feverish lights, he can feel Lotor's hands through his again: how he clasps the arch of Zethrid's hips, pinning her down as he laps and sucks, his whole body strung up with her fist and the sound of her groan overhead. 

"Yeah," she breathes. "Yeah, _finally_ —"

Impact.

In the closet, Matt's pitched himself onto his hands and knees, and he feels himself again through the lamp-light and the drowsy haze: his calves, his jaw, the dull throb caught in his palms, bruises rattling up his nerves as he pants and trembles. There's a trick to this, Matt thinks—he knows it, he _knows_ , but every number only slips through him, spinning out of reach. 

He can't slip. He has to count.

Two hours since they'd boarded the scout-ship. Three since he'd last slept. Fifteen constellations invented in the lost darkness of their cockpit, netting seventy-two stars—but Lotor makes a sound, snarling low, as Zethrid runs her talons over his nape, and heat cracks through Matt's spine with her possessive, rumbling approval.

He's dreaming, just a dream. But Lotor's still going, swaying in place as Acxa rucks his waistband off his hips, murmuring and yielding to every touch, real like nothing else in the dark. Matt's got the feel for it now—the way Lotor's eyes have lidded, the floor patching cold into his knees. He could almost piece together how Lotor must look: his lips worked into a gleaming flush, hair roping bright with sweat, fingers bolted in stiff points over Zethrid's skin. Allowed to touch, but not to claim. 

It's a good look for him.

He should stop. But Matt knows that the way he knows too many other things. _Knowing_ 's the problem—knowing too much, facts and sensations saturating him like a season of hunger, the electricity of their desperation flaying into nerve and bone. He knows what comes next. How things will glint and clink as Acxa sweeps through the scattered leftovers of their first aid, corking and pouring. The trail she'll rub down to the base of his spine, testing the temperature and slickness smeared over her fingertips. The first thrust, fingers crooking to keep the points of her nails from scratching skin, prying deep into him as he jerks and his back strings into an arch, stretching a familiar ache into wanting.

He knows and knows, and he's flushed after all—fever-cheeked under the dim lights, veins pounding hard as a war chant as his thighs grit together.

 _No,_ Matt says, or wants to, or thinks he might. But his body's caught in the undertow of a dream, and the dream knows better. His mouth shapes a mute, gutted pant; his body throbs, heels scrabbling, cock twitching, as his fists wring against the floor. Somewhere in the haze, they've just started to move together. Acxa's shucked her breastplate and shoulderpieces, slid open enough of her suit to slot her bare hips against the backs of Lotor's thighs. There's something thicker sliding between the crook and spread of her fingers, ridged and heavy, pulsing where it smears against his skin; the sheer size of it makes Matt's mouth go dry, shuddering on muscle memory: a body stretched to the brink, feeling every ridge as it thrusts inside of him, grinding him breathless.

Lotor isn't the only one who wants it.

There's more to it. He knows that too, and he doesn't. Feels the certainty like a word tickling the edges of his teeth—something almost sinuous in the way each thrust twists deeper inside of him, pulse after pulse that doesn't match the shift of Acxa's weight at his back. If he thinks about it, he might understand.

But it doesn't matter. Zethrid _yanks_ , and they're gasping together, Lotor and Matt alike. Heat smears through the backs of his eyes. The hold's ringing with their echoes: grunts coming in puffs, the slicked sound of thrust after thrust, the softer smack where hips dent thighs.

Sensory overload, Matt thinks wildly, that's the key. What can't be uprooted must be drowned. A hand's already rucking up all the scraps and layers of his ragged cloak, fumbling at his trousers to wrap around his own cock. The first stroke's clumsy, jerky and dry, waistband snagging on his knuckles. _Once, twice_ , and Matt's responding in spite of himself, frustrated and aching, light rolling filmy under his eyelids. Pressure's familiar, a relief, as good as he can get with his body twisting against steel—but Lotor breathes and it crackles across his skin; he squeezes and feels his own heartbeat tapping in time with Lotor's murmurs, the fever and friction spilling out of some too-close room.

Acxa's leaned close. Her breath haloes Lotor's shoulder as she sinks the points of her nails into Zethrid's thigh. "Mind yourself, Zethrid," she says—and he knows that hoarseness, knows how it tastes when it curls against his tongue. "You're today's winner, but no more."

"Spoilsport. Come on, you're holding him back." Her heel hooks along the back of Acxa's hip, _jolts_ her forward; Lotor groans, and her grin flashes bright greed. "Do it right, I really want to feel you _lick_."

Salt glints on his lips; it thickens with his swallow. In another room, Lotor's mouthing back along the line of his general's thigh, biting muscle just to feel her grip clench down. His gasp shatters into laughter. 

"How you enjoy spoiling yourself," Lotor says. His satisfaction's draped across Matt's nerves like ragged silk rubbing wire—and he's losing track of the distance, the walls and the shadows and the ache riding down his spine, his mouth watering, fingers curling and smearing through each hard pump as Acxa snaps hard into the next thrust, whole body wrenching and squeezing just to feel her throb inside of him—

" _Lotor_ ," Acxa grits out, choking on it. Just his name. Just that easy.

They're rocking together to a settled, marrow-deep rhythm, wordless but every inch understood—fingers thrusting with the roll of his tongue, teasing and sucking, hips grinding a flush into skin. He's bruised and sore down to his bones, panting in short bursts for air that won't fit between his ribs, stretched to the brink as every ache and thrust tumbles through him, crystallising to a point. 

Matt knows better. He knows—Lotor's the one spread apart, _Lotor_ 's aching—but all their boundaries are snapping out like cut candles. He's shaking hard, gritting a shaky little groan under the gleaming shelves, and _wanting_ feels like all that's left in him. There's a hand pressing against his mouth, and unthinking, Matt's licking wet his own palm, frantic and lavish, working through a string of sloppy strokes with his legs spread and his head tipped back like it's his scalp under Zethrid's talons. Lotor's thighs strain and Matt rides out the surge with him, knees spread apart and his palm gleaming slick, hips jerking with Acxa's steady, gutting thrusts.

 _Count down._ There's a mantra ready at the backs of his teeth, old formulas and constellations pearled into clusters across his tongue. He can stop anytime he wants. But Lotor's close—he must be, with a shudder gritted between his shoulder blades, the way his veins throb as he rocks into Acxa's open hands. It'd be easy, he thinks—thinks and imagines and _knows_ as Lotor's breath shakes through his teeth without sound. Easy to wrap his hands over Lotor's hipbones. Easy to brace his weight and slide into him, feeling all that control giving way, inch by inch—

Matt groans.

It's too much. Acxa's still grinding into him with slow, brutal strokes, driving him to gasp, stretched too full and needing _more_ ; Zethrid's tensed in wait above him, her fingers bunched in his hair, dull thick pangs coming heavy as heartbeats under her knuckles. They'll keep going, he knows—working him over, thrusting into him, wringing shudders out of him with every pull. Let him come, then push him into another round, another and another, until they use him up. Merciless, just the way Lotor trained them to be.

A new sound snags in his throat. He's jerking himself off in quick rough pulls, mouth heavy with sour salt and his shoulders stringing tight—and feels, at the teetering edge of pleasure, a bitten, faraway moan.

It isn't his.

Shock flames through him. In a room just out of sight, Lotor's spine is locking rigid. His eyes have snapped wide; his long fingers rake down, scraping a snarl out of Zethrid as blood beads across her thigh—but it's too late. They're together in this, panting in matched pulses, Lotor's hips rocking with Matt's rhythm into the empty air, his dick twitching hot as Lotor's pleasure wraps down his spine—every sense felt and doubled, crashing into a single desperate surge. Just like that, they're lost: stars fracturing sight and sound and thought as they buck together, two bodies trembling on the same wavelength, swept out and gone.

# *


End file.
